The(questionable) burdens of leadership of a troll Emperor
by Noodlehammer
Summary: Having check-mated himself into a corner with his acquisition of little sisters that needed protecting as well as freedom, Naruto resigns himself to the idea of taking charge of a nation for their sake. That didn't mean he was going to take the whole thing as seriously as his wife had intended though. Fourth in series.
1. Chapter 1

**Alrighty, first the standard DISCLAIMER: I dun own it. Also, the cake is a lie.**

**You may have noticed that I updated fairly fast when I said that I probably wouldn't. That's because I thought I was going to spend some time working out a plotline for a change, but I was wrong...apparently I can't bring myself to plan these things ahead to save my life :P. I've also been on vacation for the past ten days and I got bored, so I started writing.**

**Hopefully it turns out decent xD.**

**Also, I will be making some fairly big and some rather more minor changes to the Stargate continuity, as certain things about the series never did make much sense, especially once you try to write about them. Additionally, I will also be making a lot of stuff up as I go whenever I need some detail that the TV show never provided.**

**IMPORTANT NOTICE: If you have by some bizzare miracle stumbled on this story first, then you should note that this is actually the fourth in a series and will make incredibly little sense if you haven't read the first three.**

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Around a very average main sequence yellow star named Agrak orbited a planetary system composed of three planets, four gas giants, their various moons and two asteroid belts of considerable size.

This planetary system was located about 30,000 light years away from Earth to the Galactic East-northeast, a considerable distance outward along the Sagittarius Arm of the Galaxy.

The first two planets were host to extremely hostile conditions that didn't support life, but the third was quite beautiful, a blue-green gem obscured in places by white clouds and orbited by two moons. This planet was known as Erius to those who called it home.

Currently that included the former Goa'uld System Lord Zeus and his Queen Hera. At least, Zeus liked to consider himself a deposed System Lord, even though his rebellion against his former overlord and father Cronus had only been successful for a mere handful of years before Cronus had taken the title away from him again.

Being a Goa'uld, Zeus looked more or less identical to every other member of his serpentine species, at least as far as non-Goa'uld were concerned, but that was unimportant since the Goa'uld were a parasitic species that favored humans hosts.

The unfortunate man that Zeus had taken as a host was handsome, tall and fit despite being somewhere in his mid to late fifties. His short hair was snow white, as was his immaculately kept beard. He was dressed in a toga style outfit that clearly had Greek origins, but had been through considerable modifications.

Zeus was convinced that his fall from grace was due to the Supreme System Lord Ra imposing a tithe of naquadah, Jaffa and human slaves on the System Lords after returning from the far side of his domain one day in an incredibly foul mood. In reality, it was mostly to due with the fact that the shaky alliance which he had cobbled together with his siblings Hades and Poseidon, along with his children, had degenerated into bickering and infighting over who got which pieces of Cronus' domain.

Cronus, though weakened by the uprising of the children he'd spawned with his own Queen, was not so daft as to miss an opportunity to regain his station and had swiftly capitalized on their greed. The following battles saw all of the Goa'uld who had taken on the roles of the ancient Greek pantheon of gods decimated, with the sole exception of Zeus and Hera, who had managed to escape at the expense of their entire fleet and Ares, who had seen which way the wind was blowing and turned traitor. The last bit of intelligence Zeus had managed to gather about his treacherous offspring informed him that Ares had been shifted off to some forsaken backwater, both as punishment for his original betrayal of Cronus and to keep him well away from a position that would allow him to repeat his treachery.

That had all been long ago however. Currently, Zeus was once again recovering from a crushing defeat at the hands of his father. He had spent centuries building up a new power base in secrecy so that he could once more overthrow Cronus and regain his very briefly held title. When the attack had finally been launched, things seemed to go well for a while, but then things had gone horribly wrong once again.

Ba'al, up to then an underling of Ra, had smelled an opportunity to elevate himself to a station greater than a mere lieutenant and taken it, jumping hosts and replacing Zeus' chief Fleet Lord. An act that had only been possible due to Sokar causing an uproar by managing to successfully depose Ra as Supreme System Lord at approximately the same time.

In the following chaos, Ba'al had usurped most of Zeus' fleet and allied himself with Ra in an effort to oust Sokar and Zeus once more lost everything when Cronus mopped up the rest and banished Sokar. He had only survived because he'd cut his losses and fled once again...and because he kept the existence of Erius a closely guarded secret, nobody even knew the stargate address of the planet as he had only brought one of the devices to it about a hundred years ago.

While Zeus agreed with Ba'al's choice of allying with Ra to get rid of Sokar, because Sokar was a sadistic lunatic, he still hated the opportunistic bastard for usurping _his_ fleets in order to do it! Ba'al was now a System Lord in his own right, acknowledged as such by Ra himself as reward for his ingenuity, 'loyalty' and aid in banishing Sokar, while Zeus had to hide on this backwater planet and lick his wounds.

Erius was only valuable as a bolthole to do exactly that, since it was so far out of the way from Goa'uld space that he'd never seen any point in converting it into an industrial center where ships could be built. It would take far too long for ships to reach Goa'uld space for there to be any point in doing so. Even though the Goa'uld have had hyperdrive technology for millenia, interstellar travel was still far too slow to cross such vast distances in any kind of sensible timeframe. Not that he had much of a choice in the matter anymore.

The closest Goa'uld domain to his current location belonged to Ra, but it was still so far away that Zeus was confident about remaining hidden. Besides, it was the far side of Ra's domain, where none but the Supreme System Lord himself had set foot in thousands of years.

Some Goa'uld had probably seeded the humans here thousands of years ago and either been killed since then or abandoned them when it was discovered that the planet's naquadah supplies were much smaller than expected. Unsurprising really, the majority of Goa'uld territory was clustered around the Galactic Core(with the System Lords naturally keeping a firm grip on the best worlds) exactly because it had a higher number of naquadah rich worlds for some reason. It wasn't _impossible_ to find a naquadah rich world elsewhere, but it was much less likely. Then there was also the fact that Ra laid claim to nearly a full third of the best planets for himself, with his territory extending to cover large swaths of space to the Galactic East and South as well.

Those areas were strictly off limits for all Goa'uld except Ra and everyone had a good idea why that was. Though the exact location and stargate symbols for the planet were long forgotten by most Goa'uld, they all knew that Tau'ri, the first world, had to be there somewhere. Zeus had been there himself for a few hundred years before he'd struck out on his own and could certainly understand why Ra now jealously kept that world for himself alone. Though completely barren of naquadah, it had a vast population of humans living on it due to it being their homeworld, giving Ra access to a massive slave workforce that no other Goa'uld could match. Additionally, Ra was also a great oddity among his race in the fact that he used human warriors along the Jaffa, though this might simply be because he had so _many_ of them available.

Zeus had entertained the idea of using Erius as a secret outpost from which to launch raids into Ra's territory in order to speed up his recovery from the recent defeat, but dismissed it soon after. He had only one Ha'tak mothership, a few Al'kesh bombers and a few dozen Udajeet fighter craft, while Ra had vast fleets of ships. Added onto that, Ra also had a considerable technological advantage over the other Goa'uld and was acknowledged to be the most cunning of them as well as being highly vindictive when someone challenged him. He simply could not afford to make such a move, not when Ra was both more powerful and more intelligent than Cronus.

Besides, it wasn't as if he could afford to leave Erius unattended at this point. He had only a few hundred Jaffa to his name and if it wasn't for the threat of his ships, the natives would have long since overwhelmed them with sheer numbers, even if they had to do it with improvised wooden clubs.

It had only been slightly over two hundred years since since he had taken over Erius after it had been forgotten for centuries and enslaved the humans living on it, which naturally meant that there were still resentful and potentially dangerous pockets of resistance hidden among them. It was to be expected of course, since he had immediately begun forcing them to mine the planet's meager supplies of naquadah for his own use and banned writing of any sort to keep them from getting ideas. They had tried to fight him, unwilling as they were to bow to their new god and many had been killed as examples so that the others would know their place. This had led to a drop in their population, which was probably necessary at the moment. He didn't want them getting ideas about staging another uprising after all, but it did slow down the mining operations. At the current rate, it would be centuries before he could challenge one of the other System Lords for their position again.

Sitting alone in the throne room, Zeus let out a sigh that he couldn't afford to make in front of other people if he wanted to keep up his god persona, and wondered why was it that all his plans got ruined by bad luck and poor timing.

At least none of the others knew about Erius, so he would be safe from attack and could rebuild without having to fend off the greedy paws of both lesser and great Goa'uld. Maybe he should stop worrying about this and have his First Prime bring one of the human females to him? That was definitely one of the things he enjoyed most about having a human host and it was always good for stress relief. He was in fact thinking of having a few of the prettier women trained as pleasure slaves...it would certainly make his temporary exile more bearable.

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Directly contrary to the thoughts of Zeus, it was the very isolation that Erius enjoyed which drew the attention of two people far more dangerous than his fellow Goa'uld.

Naruto and Xanna appeared on the planet with the barest distortion of air and took a moment to assess the planet that they would be calling home for a long time to come.

"I hadn't expected it to feel so much like Earth." Naruto commented.

"It is not so surprising, many of the plants and animals clearly originated from there, though there are also a good number that are native." Xanna answered. "But that isn't important right now. First, let us take the planet away from these parasites that consider themselves gods."

"That really bugs you doesn't it?" He snickered as they started walking towards the obviously newly built palace where Zeus and Hera spent most of their time.

Xanna did not consider the question to be worth answering.

On the way there, they passed the small city where the humans of the world lived. Though calling it a city was being overly generous. The core of it was made up of sturdy stone buildings that had vaguely Ancient Greek origins, while the outskirts were a great deal more ramshackle and haphazard. Clearly, Zeus had attacked any other population centers and forced all of the humans to live in one place where he could more easily keep them under control, disregarding any logistic considerations in the process. More than likely, famine and disease had killed more of them than weapons fire.

He and Xanna had only made a cursory investigation into these Goa'uld before deciding to take this world for themselves, but it was enough to give him the impression that the serpentine species was made up entirely of dumbasses. Morality aside, they seemed hellbent on using the most inefficient possible means of achieving their goals in favor of pandering to their egos.

The palace that they were now approaching was a good example of this. Big, luxurious and imposing as it sat on a hill overlooking the city of enslaved humans.

It was also a completely idiotic waste of resources for someone who was only using the planet as a temporary shelter while he prepared to attack his own kind again, not that he would ever get to do that.

Long before they reached the actual entrance to the palace, they were waylaid by a group of alarmed looking Jaffa who shouted something at them in Goa'uld. Neither Naruto or Xanna understood the words as they had not bothered learning the language yet, but they got the general idea that he was ordering them to stop.

Naruto took hold of his wife's hand to soothe her knee jerk anger at being told what to do, something that had always been an issue for her. She calmed down easily enough, being well aware that the Jaffa guard in front of them were not the right people to be angry at.

Seeing that the dangerous looking horned duo had absolutely no intention of stopping their leasurely advance towards their god, the Jaffa opened fire with their staff weapons, only to gape in shock as the orange bolts that they had seen take many lives before were contenptously slapped away as though they were no more dangerous than an insect. In that moment, they understood that their lord Zeus was being challenged by these two horned gods, who had come personally instead of sending armies to attack the weakened Thunder God.

They shared confused looks when they were spared instead of slain as they had expected to be. Coming across a single god, much less two, without a even a single guard or attendant was unheard of as it was, but to be spared after attacking them? That was something that the Jaffa simply couldn't wrap their heads around and so they continued to merely stare confusedly at the retreating backs of the two tall gods.

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"They sure give up easily." Naruto commented as they passed yet another group of bamboozled Jaffa after easily deflecting the fire from their plasma weapons.

Naruto had some thoughts on those staff weapons of theirs and most of them were not very charitable. They were cumbersome, innacurate, clumsy and every conceivable other negative description for a projectile weapon that he could think of on short notice. The only good thing that he could say about them was that they could be used as a staff in melee combat and that they made cool explosions when they hit something.

"These Goa'uld have gone to great lengths to solidify the notion that they are gods in the minds of their soldiers. Naturally it follows that a Jaffa has no hope of fighting a god so they shouldn't even try or else face execution for their 'insolence', but that sword cuts both ways." Xanna replied.

"I've suddenly developed the suspicion that seeing two Goa'uld on the same battlefield is something that just doesn't happen." He said thoughtfully after taking a moment to think her words over.

Xanna snorted derisively at that. "You say that as if you are likely so see even _one_ of them on a battlefield."

"Good point."

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Zeus was jolted out of his thoughts when his newly promoted First Prime ran into the room, a look of urgency on his face.

"My lord, two unknown gods are approaching. My warriors have attempted to stop them, but are unable to challenge their power." The man said.

"WHAT?!" Zeus demanded loudly in shock, surging to his feet to glare at the kneeling Jaffa. "What markings are on the heads of their warriors?"

"They come alone my lord and refuse to speak to us."

Zeus was taken aback in sheer surprise, an event like this being completely unheard of. It was an unwritten and unspoke rule among their kind that they avoided face to face meetings as much as possible, especially during battle. Their assertions of godhood meant that any such meeting would inevitably need to be resolved with one on one combat, with the winner taking everything. While such a thing would be a great boon for any Goa'uld, it was also far too risky to attempt. Not to mention that no Goa'uld could be trusted to be fair.

Which made him wonder which of his fellows would be so brazen as to walk into the territory of another Goa'uld without any Jaffa to back them up. He could not think of any major or minor Goa'uld that would dare attempt such a thing, no matter how weakened he was right now.

"Describe them to me."

The description of a tall man and woman with claws, fangs, slit eyes and horned heads did not serve to ease his mind in the slightest but it did clear up a bit of confusion. It was not a species that he was familiar with, but they were clearly formidabble. He had no idea what technology they had to be able to do this, but he wanted it. They hadn't killed any of his Jaffa despite being attacked, so they may not be here to kill him. He hoped so, because he was not eager to get into a fight with someone who could so easily walk past his defenses. With some luck, this might be just the windfall he needed to regain his rightful place as System Lord, though he was not too hopeful on that count.

Truth be told, if he could have he would have fled already, but that road was closed. His Ha'tak was nearby, but not so close that he would reach it in time and that was assuming that they didn't have ships of their own in orbit.

If Te'lok, his current First Prime, had informed him of them sooner, then he might have been able to flee either through the stargate or get to the Ha'tak to scan nearby space for a possible escape route.

Zeus spared a moment of regret for the loss of Heracles, his previous First Prime who had died covering his recent escape. Like many before him, Heracles had been named and raised by him personally, ensuring unswerving loyalty. It was a time consuming and often tedious process, but had proven it's worth many times before.

Te'lok had become First Prime becase he was the next highest ranked warrior, but he was a poor replacement.

Listening to Te'lok's recounting of how the two intruders had swiftly and easily penetrated his admittedly substandard defenses, Zeus had to conclude that there truly had been no time to even have some Jaffa board their gliders and attack from the air. Still, he made a note to punish Te'lok for not reporting the situation sooner.

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Naruto hummed a nonsensical tune to himself as he ambled unconcernedly through the incredibly ugly, gold painted hallways. Who in their right mind coats the halls in gold anyway? He could practically feel his eyes watering just looking at them. He could almost imagine his wife's eyes twitching at the disgusting gaudiness of it all.

Speaking of Xanna, she wasn't by his side anymore, having decided that she would go kill the god wannabe's Queen while he took care of the douche himself.

The Jaffa had backed off and weren't trying to impede his progress anymore, so it wasn't long before he wandered into the throne room. It was also painted in the same gaudy gold, with the rather cliche braziers burning on the walls as a light source. Seriously, using braziers as a light source when you were a space faring civilization? He hadn't seen anything so ridiculous since the last time he'd heard a man saying that God hates lesbians.

Madness, God loves lesbians. He should know, he was one.

But getting back to the point, the supposed god trying to look imperious on his ugly ass throne said something in that deep voice with too much vibrato in it. Had Naruto spoken Goa'uld, he would have known that Zeus said something to the effect of 'I am Zeus, God of Thunder, who comes before me?'.

As it was, it only made Naruto roll his eyes at the self important arrogance in the tone, while he attacked the parasite's mind to extract the language. Normally, he needed a few minutes to unobstrusively copy the language to his own mind and integrate it, followed by a few more minutes of getting used to actually speaking it, but he couldn't be bothered this time. The evil was practically rolling off the snake he could sense wrapped around the old man's spinal cord, so instead of a light touch, he went in with the mental equivalent of a chainsaw.

Zeus screamed as pain-that-was-not-pain exploded in his mind, causing Te'lok to aim his staff weapon at the horned man that looked to be concentrating on something. The few bolts that Te'lok fired were harmlessly blocked with a faintly red shield of some sort, preventing even the usual explosion from occuring.

Seeing that ranged attacks were not working, Te'lok closed to melee with the full expectation that he would die for his brazen attack. Still, there was nothing he could do about it, not when his god had been attacked.

Naruto easily caught the staff weapon and flipped the Jaffa onto his back. "Stay down...wow, this language is really stupid."

Holding his head and trying to subdue the strange pressure in his mind, Zeus managed to croak out another question. "Who are you?"

"I'm the man that's going to kill you."

Distantly, Zeus noticed that the horned man was enunciating the Goa'uld language as if it was new to him, from which it naturally followed that he had likely just learned it. The idea that this interloper was capable of such a feat was not comforting, nor was the flat statement of intent to kill.

"What grievance do you have with me?" Zeus hedged, trying to buy time.

"You shouldn't have pretended to be a god, you never know when a real one is going to take offense to something like that. Additionally, this is also a very nice planet, so we're taking it because we can." Naruto told him with a grin.

Mind you, Naruto did not actually give a damn whether they claimed to be gods, Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy or the Easter Bunny, but it was a good a reason as any and Xanna _was_ vaguely offended that these bottom feeders made claims of divinity.

Meanwhile, Naruto was of the opinion that they'd actually done a half-decent job at pretending to be gods.

For one, they were all a bunch of assholes, which was always a very important trait of godhood. Naruto was well aware that he and Xanna were assholes by any definiton of the word(except the literal one that is).

Secondly, they had massive egos(mostly unjustifiably, but that wasn't important), which was almost as important as being an asshole. He and Xanna had _justifiably_ massive egos, though his wife tended to overdo it for fun.

Thirdly, they wielded powers that the populations they ruled didn't. That their power came from technology was irrelevant. The Sekirei's power had also originated in technology, yet they couldn't bring people back from the dead, while the Goa'uld could with their sarcophagus.

Since Zeus fancied himself a 'God of Thunder', there was only one thing to do.

"Dance for me oh 'Thunder God'." The words were cackled out more than said and punctuated by a small blast of lightning directed from Naruto's clawed index finger, aimed at Zeus' feet.

The Goa'uld jumped in both surprise and fright and then continued jumping as more tiny lightning blasts were shot at him.

Naruto let out a giggle that was deeply disturbing coming from someone of his size and then pouted when his target used that gaudy gold ribbon device on his hand to project a golden energy shield(yet again gold. He was starting to really dislike that color) and block his low powered attacks.

"That's cute, but can it block this?" He asked and increased the intensity of his attack to something slightly more lethal.

Zeus kept up the shield, but could rapidly feel himself weaken. It was not immediately apparent, but while the kara kesh had a small power source of it's own, it was mostly dependent on the naquadah present in the bloodstream of the Goa'uld symbiote and its host to activate it and this prolonged attack was straining those reserves of energy considerably. The personal shield that all Goa'uld employed was meant to block weapons fire from a staff weapon or zat'nik'tel, not a sustained barrage of lighting.

What was this insanity? A man that could throw lightning from his hands and so easily block the plasma bolts of a staff weapon? The most confusing part of it was that there was no obvious technology at play either. While the kara kesh hand device was subtle and unobtrusive, the horned man clearly had nothing at all on his hands. He was barely wearing anything as it was!

Even as he thought this, another idea occured to him. It was risky, but he didn't seem to have any other options anyway. He could jump hosts and take control of this powerful horned man. The risk was in the fact that not all species could be possessed and jumping into an unknown host could prove fatal. But if it worked...then he would have a host the likes of which every Goa'uld dreamed of having.

"Interesting gizmo you've got there, might be worth figuring out in my off time, but first I've got to kill you. No hard feelings, you're just too ugly to live." Naruto said offhandedly and started stalking towards the would be god.

Zeus ignored the insult and focused on projecting an aprehensive image as the horned man approached, all the while preparing to jump hosts. Not a very hard thing to do since he _was_ aprehensive.

As soon as he was in range, Zeus released his hold over his current host's spinal column and launched himself at the neck of the horned man, ripping apart the throat of the host that had carried him for thousands of years now.

Almost negligibly, Naruto caught the squirming, bloodsoaked serpent in the air and examined it while the old man, who had long since gone mad, quickly died, finally free.

The Goa'uld was a curious creature, powerfully but compactly muscled, with a quartet of mandibles that were likely used to latch onto the brain and take control of a host as well as penetrate the skin. It's eyes were a nearly glowing red and it had a fin on its back, denoting aquatic origins.

"Well aren't you the ambitious one." Naruto murmured, while turning it over, putting a deliberately uncomfortable amount of pressure on the tiny spine of the parasite "I'm impressed that an oversized tapeworm like you has the ego to claim godhood."

The Goa'uld screeched something and Naruto could sense that it was hurling panicked curses at him inside its mind, knowing that it was about to die. Funnily enough, it seemed that the Goa'uld language didn't have any properly good curses.

"That's not very nice." He chided as he felt something mildly creative pass through the creature's mind, but this time directed at the indecisive and confused Jaffa. "Te'lok did the best he could."

The Jaffa in question started at being spoken of, having resigned himself to watching his god be killed by a more powerful one and waiting to offer his service as was the custom when one's god was defeated.

"Are you _still_ playing with that thing?" Xanna's voice drifted into the room from the entrance before Te'lok could even try to say something, also speaking Goa'uld.

"I was thinking of keeping a fish tank full of these things around for fun, see if they start eating each other after a while." Naruto said amusedly.

"While that might be amusing, I have no wish to keep these disgusting things around at the moment. We will be busy enough without the need to take care of pets, especially ones who are only fit to swim in their own filth." She replied.

Naruto sighed as if greatly disappointed and turned to look back on the squirming parasite in his fist, grabbing the small skull in two fingers. "You heard the lady, time to die."

Zeus screeched in pain as the two fingers slowly closed the distance between them, not pausing the slightest bit as the bones started breaking.

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Te'lok had watched the casual(and pitiless) execution of his god with a sense of aprehension. It was a Jaffa's lot in life to serve the gods, but he feared that this brutal god and his equally brutal Queen would be even harsher than Zeus had been.

Nevertheless, he pushed aside his misgivings and kneeled. "Lord, you have slain our god and taken his domain. I pledge my honor and my life to your service."

A flicker of introspection passed through his mind at this point, wondering if there could be something more to the life of a warrior than endlessly fighting the warriors of rival gods. He also wondered whether the other Jaffa who had survived while their god did not ever considered this.

Naruto looked over the kneeling man in a cursory inspection. Tan skin tone, moderately tall, in very good physical condition, hair shaved closely for minimum maintenance. The man was obviously a warrior and had been for his entire life. There was only one thing to do.

"No thanks, we have no use for slaves." He said dismissively.

The casual refusal of his service came as a great shock to Te'lok, who had never heard of such a thing happening. The gods always needed warriors to secure their territories or fight against their rivals, the idea that one of them would refuse an offer of service was unheard of. Out of the corner of his mind, he saw that even the horned woman looked askance at her companion, though he had no idea of the silent conversation between them.

_What are you doing husband? We came here to take over and refusing the service of these Jaffa will only create problems later on._

_Trust me on this._

Once Te'lok had sufficiently recovered from his shock, he felt the need to argue the point that the horned man had made, though he knew that arguing with the gods tended to be hazardous. His honor and pride would not allow him to keep quiet however.

"Pardon lord, but I am not a slave." He managed to keep his tone humble and apologetic despite his offense at being called a slave. In his mind, slaves were humans and Jaffa were warriors. True, they both served the Goa'uld, but he had never considered himself a slave.

"Then why are you on your knees?" Naruto asked with pointed amusement.

Face creased with confusion, Te'lok slowly rose to his feet, wondering if this was some elaborate test and he was about to be killed. When fatal consequences for daring to stand without being given leave failed to appear, he tentatively concluded that there was something very different going on than the usual Goa'uld takeover.

"The Goa'uld wanted you to kneel. If you want to be part of the empire we intend to build, then you're going to have to stand."

Te'lok may not have been a particularly philosophical man, but he did understand what was being said here and it appealed to him greatly. This god demanded strength from those who would serve under him, not submission. That was definitely something he could respect, aside from just the power and martial skill that the horned man clearly wielded.

"Then I would stand with you lord, but first I would have your name." He said boldly, standing firmly and hiding the minor uncertainty he still felt at being so forward.

The approving grin he got in return confirmed that his thoughts had been correct. "My name is Naruto and this is my wife Xanna."

Te'lok returned the horned woman's slight inclination of the head with a respectful one of his own before he focused back on the man who had already garnered a lot of his respect. Usually when a Goa'uld was defeated by another, many of his Jaffa died before the remainder were absorbed into the forces of the victor, but not a single warrior died today. That, along with the fact Naruto was well aware that warriors took their pride and honor quite seriously did a great deal to winning him over completely.

"What would you have of me my lord?" He asked formally.

"Firstly, lets get rid of that thing on your forehead." Naruto said and reached out to place his fingers on the gold symbol of Zeus, a pair of crossed thunderbolts.

Te'lok felt his forehead tingle and reached up to touch it once the horned man had removed his fingers, feeling surprised to feel only smooth skin. Mere days ago, his forehead had been cut with an orak knife and molten gold had been poured into the resulting wound, signifying his rise to the position of First Prime to Zeus. The process had been extremely painful, but Te'lok had been proud at the time.

"Secondly, I would have you consider the fact that once that symbiote inside your pouch matures, there will be no more to replace it now that Hera is dead." Naruto told him, lips twitching at how silly this old style speech seemed to him.

That brought Te'lok up short, as he hadn't thought of that yet. He was just a young Jaffa of sixty and had already carried five Goa'uld to maturity up to this point, while his current one would mature within a year or two.

It was not impossible for a Jaffa to carry a mature symbiote, but the serpents became restless and wanted to find a host to possess. Truth be told, he had no idea what would happen if he continued walking around with a fully mature symbiote for an extended period of time, as Zeus' priests always made sure to remove the mature ones and replace them with young ones, but he did not imagine that it would end well for him.

"You should be aware that the Goa'uld need you far more than you need them, so they have made certain that you are dependant on them for your life." Xanna told him.

Te'lok frowned again, being forced to think a great deal more than usual. "Then I will die if I do not find another symbiote to replace my current one once it matures?"

"That would be one solution, the other would require you to let me heal you, giving up the long life granted to you by carrying that thing inside you, but you would be free of them completely."

The former First Prime was at a loss over what to do next, having never had this much freedom to decide on things for himself before. While being free of the need to carry a Prim'tah would be nice, he didn't want to give up the good health and longevity it granted either.

"Take some time to think about it and get back to me once you've made a decision." Naruto told him in a dismissive tone. "In the meanwhile, have the other Jaffa come see us so that we can remove the markings on their foreheads and then go tell the humans that they can stop working in the mines and go home."

"Understood." Te'lok said with a nod and went to find his fellow Jaffa, who were no doubt just outside, waiting to hear of the outcome of the battle and what was to become of them.

Important life decisions could wait for later, once he'd had time to consider them more carefully. For now, he would follow the shockingly benevolent orders of his new lord.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

"How clever of you, playing on the Jaffa's warrior culture to inspire their loyalty." Xanna commented once the last of the Jaffa had the marks on their foreheads removed and been offered the same deal as Te'lok.

"You make it sound so underhanded." Naruto grinned back at her.

"Almost as underhanded as offering to fix their immune systems if they wanted it, without mentioning that we have no intention of raiding any Goa'uld temples for fresh symbiotes if they refuse." She agreed.

"They could always join the service of some other Goa'uld, I wouldn't stop them from leaving." He shrugged.

"But you also know they won't do that since many of them have families here thanks to Zeus being forced to establish a Jaffa community." She pointed out.

Goa'uld generally preferred to enforce a strict separation between the Jaffa and humans, marking some planets as Jaffa worlds and others as worlds where human slaves toiled to mine naquadah for them. No doubt this was done out of fear that yet another rebellion might ensue from their interaction, but Zeus had been forced to allow it due to being left with only this one planet.

"Okay, so I am playing them like a harp, but it's for their own good." He conceded with another grin. "I'll have to deal with the few of them that don't like us as it is."

Xanna nodded in agreement. Simply accepting their service as had been her intent would have been easier in the short term, but those dissidents would have eventually started becoming unhappy with the way that she and Naruto were going to do things. Naruto's approach was somewhat more long winded, but when it was over, he would command the loyalty of those Jaffa without question because they would respect him as a fellow warrior.

She knew that she couldn't pull off the same thing, partially because Jaffa society saw women as second class citizens, but mostly because she did not have the same natural, easygoing charisma that her husband exuded. The first issue was easy enough to fix, but the second was not. She had never been a warrior and the Jaffa would be unable to relate to her, something that her aloof manner would only exacerbate...which was why she would have settled for their subservience instead of their willing loyalty.

"Well nevermind that now, lets bring Akitsu out of stasis like we promised her." Naruto continued.

In shot order, the Ice Sekirei was released from temporal stasis and blinked at her new surroundings. From her perspective, she had been in the very comfortable hotel room one moment and in this gaudy, gold encrusted throne room the next.

Still, that didn't really concern her and she happily moved to first Naruto and then Xanna a hug, being well aware that more time had passed for them than it did for her.

"How do you like the new place sweetie?" Naruto asked teasingly.

"Ah...it's ugly."

Naruto and Xanna snorted in amusement at the extremely accurate description.

"Easy enough to fix." Xanna muttered and stripped all the gold from the walls with a wave of her hand. What fascination humans, and apparently to an even greater the degree the Goa'uld, had with the worthless metal escaped them, but they certainly weren't going to tolerate it. Humanity at least had the excuse that it had been used as the basis of currency for thousands of years, but the Goa'uld actually seemed to like it for the purposes of decoration...a concept that baffled them since the effect of that much gold plastered everywhere was rather headache inducing.

The walls instantly became more bearable to look at, though the spam of hieroglyphics all over them were still annoying to look at and would need fixing. In point of fact the whole damned palace would likely need to be remodeled if not outright torn down and rebuilt.

Any further conversation or perhaps breaking in of their new home through judicious application of sex was interrupted by the apperance of a human sized glowing object. In a few seconds, the glow receded to reveal a dark haired woman in a modest white dress that was perhaps somewhere in her thirties by human terms, though it was impossible to tell how old she really was.

"Greetings Outsiders." She said, in Japanese to their mild surprise. The surprise was mostly due to the fact that she spoke the language rather than the fact that she would choose that particular one...they _had_ been conversing in it just now after all.

Clearly, anime had been correct in its supposition that the entire Universe spoke Japanese.

"It appears that our skulker has finally decided to reveal herself." Xanna commented to her husband, paying only minimal attention to the intruder.

"So it would seem." Naruto agreed with a frown, his libido not particularly fond of the delay. "What the hell do you want? If you're here to get fucked then you'll have to wait your turn."

The newcomer was severely taken aback by by the reaction that her entrance had received, which was about as far from the norm as it could get. The horned woman's dismissive mention of having known about her presence despite the fact that she should have been invisible was bad enough, but the utter crudeness that had followed was so alien to her that she had no idea how to react.

Xanna smirked at the poleaxed look that the intruder was sporting, amused as ever at how easily Naruto turned something as inane as foul language and innuendo into a weapon to keep people off balance.

"That is not why I am here." She managed to say, though a bit more stiffly than she would have wished. "I am here to-"

"And now she just moves on to the point without even introducing herself." Xanna interrupted scathingly, ignoring the fact that she frequently did the exact same thing.

If the newcomer still had blood she would have flushed. That was indeed something she had forgotten about in the wake of her surprise.

"My name is Ganos Lal and I am a spokesperson for the Ascended."

The Ascended had actually been the first evolution of humans called 'Alterans' or 'Lanteans' and in the later stages of their civilization 'the Ancients' before their biological and technological evolution had run its course and allowed them to ascend to a higher plane of existence as beings of pure energy. Before their Ascension, they had planted the seeds for the current, 'second' evolution of Humanity.

An unfortunate side effect of them leaving the material plane behind was the fact that they'd also left much of their technology lying around. Technology such as the stargates which allowed one to travel from planet to planet across thousands of locations all over the Galaxy by way of an artificially created stable wormhole. Those particular devices had been what the newly emerged Goa'uld had used to leave their planet and allowed them to stumble on some Alteran spaceships which they then used as a basis for creating their own ships.

On the upside, much of that technology was far, far too advanced for the Goa'uld to figure out, no matter how good they were at stealing other people's technology, but it was still the root cause of their current domination of the Galaxy and the enslavement of millions.

Of course, now that they were Ascended beings, they could have easily destroyed the Goa'uld or confined them to a primitive world, but the majority of the Ascended had declared that it was forbidden to interfere with the lower planes and enforced this rule steadfastly to prevent anyone from breaking it, even if it was to clean up the mess they left behind.

Which actually tied in to why Ganos had been sent here.

While their entrance into their reality had been incredibly unobtrusive, it had not been so unobtrusive as to remain unnoticed. It was not everyday that someone punctured through the fabric of space-time with only their will, even if care had been taken to keep their passage from destabilizing anything. The Ascended had been quite baffled by this feat, as it was something even they could not do and the following minor usages of supernatural power hadn't helped clear anything up. While they had at one point developed technology to jump to a parallel dimension, that only worked if the other dimension had developed the exact same technology, which considerably limited their options in that venue, but these two had done it as easily as stepping through a doorway with only their minds...hence why they had been dubbed 'Outsiders' by the Ascended.

True, highly evolved sentients were capable of telepathy, telekinesis and certain other feats that might have been called supernatural(these were all the signs of a species on the brink of being able to ascend), but the spirits of these horned newcomers blazed with an incomprehensible energy the likes of which the Ascended had never fathomed could be held by beings of flesh and blood. The third one, the young woman they'd pulled out of some kind of dimensional fold also had some sort of power in her, but it was infinitely weaker and slightly different.

Which was why they had been observing them and deciding what do do. By their own rules, they couldn't interfere in the goings on of the prime material plane, but there were some fairly extraordinary circumstances and so they had watched and contemplated whether to come speak to them or not.

When they had seen the pitiless execution of the two Goa'uld, they had been slightly concerned but not yet alarmed...nobody much liked the Goa'uld after all, not even other Goa'uld.

When their stated claim of establishing an empire had been told to the Jaffa, they had started becoming rather alarmed. It was not a great leap of the imagination to guess that these two were likely extremely long lived if not downright immortal, so such a claim was no trivial matter.

What was truly alarming about that was the offhanded claim of godhood, which was far too reminiscent of the Ori.

"And? So? Therefore?" Naruto prompted impatiently after a few moments of silence when Ganos didn't continue, disdaining to introduce himself in return. He'd done that more than enough times today already and she must have overheard it at least once by now during her skulking.

"Initially we were not intenting to approach you as it is our policy to not interfere with the lower planes, but your claims for divinity and intention to create an empire changed that." Ganos said, diplomatically giving no indication of her feelings on the matter, nor her surprise at their complete lack of curiousity as to what exactly the Ascended were.

"I fail to see why you would care about what we do and more importantly, I fail to see why _we_ should care about _your_ opinion." Xanna said frostily.

Ganos suppressed a frown at the horned woman's superior attitude, which was pretty much exactly the type of attitude that one would expect from someone claiming divinity. The statement was also worded in such a way that answering it directly would make the Ascended appear to be either impotent or make it look as if they were trying to threaten the horned duo with their power.

Deciding that a more indirect approach would be best, she responded in the same diplomatic tone of voice that she'd been using so far. "We are merely concerned about the impact of beings such as yourself-"

"Oh you're _concerned_!" Naruto interrupted with a crowing voice and an infuriatingly cheerful grin before turning to his wife. "You hear that love? They're _concerned_."

"Truly an event of dire significance." Xanna deadpanned. "Wouldn't you say so Akitsu?"

"Ah...yes, very important."

"Well I suppose we have no choice then." Naruto said mournfully. "We're going to have to drop everything and start informing the multiverse that a bunch of voyeuristic, has-been ghosts are _concerned_ over what we're going to do. And just think! They haven't even seen us have sex yet!"

Ganos stared at the snickering trio(well, Naruto was snickering, Xanna was smirking and Akitsu was hiding a tiny smile in Naruto's arm) with no small amount of incredulity. The idea that someone would not only refuse to take the Ascended seriously, but also mock them like this had simply never occured to any of them.

There were very few among the Ascended that had any kind of contact with the material plane, a bare handful really. Ganos or Morgana le Fay as she was more widely known to humans was herself counted among those who had more contact with the lower planes than most and even that was mostly due to that incident with Merlin a few centuries ago, which had been at the behest of the others.

Oma Desala had far more regular contact with mortals and might have been a better choice to talk to these two, but she had long since distanced herself from the other Ascended, both because she had always been of the opinion that they shouldn't completely forbid themselves from interacting with the lower planes(an edict whose boundaries she occasionally pushed) and because of her screw up with the Goa'uld Anubis.

Generally, the cause of that edict was because mortals were all too eager to think them gods and start worshipping them, especially mortals that lived in low tech societies. Considering their staunch opposition to the Ori on that particular issue, they obviously wanted to avoid that, but that did not change the fact that the Ascended had never expected to be mocked to their faces.

"If you would but listen-" Ganos started again, a small note of frustration in her tone.

"Why should we?" Xanna interrupted, quite deliberately. "You said yourself that your kind has some kind of silly policy of non-interference, so unless you're willing to change it I don't see why we should continue listening to you when we could be having sex instead."

"That policy was put in place to allow the younger civilizations to evolve without being influenced by us, but you-" Ganos said calmly, hiding her irritation at being constantly interrupted.

"Then why are you here? Kindly fuck off so that we can...fuck on." Naruto interrupted yet again, grinning at what he considered to be a rather clever bit of wordplay.

"But you are not like them, we can sense the vast power inside you. There is no reason why you should need to use physical bodies anymore, so I have been sent to ask if you could _please_ leave these humans be." The Ascended woman ground out, finding herself incredibly irritated by their seeming fixation on carnal pleasure.

"Consider your request considered and refused, now leave or we will _make_ you leave." Xanna commanded, her good humor starting to evaporate.

"You think you could force me away?" Ganos asked disbelievingly, mostly in shock at the threat. She knew they were powerful and capable of things that the Ascended weren't, but how exactly did they think that she could be forced away, when she wasn't even a physical entity?

In the next instant, she felt her ass smacking into a chair and her elbows smacking onto a table that had just materialized in front of her, which was quite the novel experience to be sure since she hadn't had an actual physical ass or elbows in ten thousand years.

A quick scan of her surroundings revealed that the hieroglyphics encrusted throne room had been changed and now seemed to be a room with many rows of chairs and desks, with a primitive whiteboard set up at the front of it.

Ganos didn't recognize it, as her people had abandoned this type of classroom design so long ago that only a historian would have seen how similar it looked to what they once used to educate their children, but she did get the general idea from the setup.

Aside from the change in venue, there were some other changes. For one, aside from her, Naruto and Akitsu were also sitting in their own desks, while Xanna was at the front, next to the whiteboard.

For another, both she and Akitsu were now dressed in some sort of girls uniform. A white top stretched tightly over the breasts, black stockings and an obscenely short light green skirt.

The final change was that Xanna's severely revealing kimono had been replaced with a white blouse that had two buttons undone to expose a great deal of dusky cleavage, while a third looked as if it was about to pop any second now. Her legs were covered by a black leather skirt and there were a pair of stylish glasses perched on her nose that made her crimson eyes stand out even further and her white hair had been bound into a high ponytal.

The entire effect was slightly thrown off by the fact that she was still barefoot, but it worked well enough.

While Ganos was looking around somewhat wildly and trying to figure out what the hell had just happened, Xanna smacked the whiteboard loudly with a telescopic metal pointer, drawing attention to the sectioned triangle drawn on it.

"This," She hissed commandingly, leveling a glare at her 'class'. "is a simplified diagram of our relative power levels."

Continuing, she once again smacked the pointer on the whiteboard, this time on the lowest part of the pyramid, where 'Animals' was clearly written.

"I should hope that you don't need me to explain this one. When sufficient time passes, animals _might_ become less stupid animals and eventually evolve sentience, upon which time they inevitably discover that it is possible to be sentient while also being dumber than an animal." She explained scathingly, moving the pointer one level up, to 'Sentients'.

"Over the course of time, this new sentient species will commit uncountable atrocities against itself and others for the most inane of reasons, most likely destroying itself in the process. If, and I stress _if_, they somehow manage to survive long enough, they have a _slight_ chance of ascending to the next level."

The pointer moved another level up, resting on 'Ascended Beings', which had a caption under it that said 'Lowly Pissants'.

"This is where you are girly." The horned woman said condescendingly, looking at a wide eyed Ganos.

"We," She continued, moving the pointer up past several sections that only had '?' written in them, all the way up to the top of the triangle, which was for some reason separated from the rest of it, most likely denoting that it was impossible to reach this level by conventional means...or at least that's what Ganos guessed. "are here."

The top had 'Primordial Forces of Creation and Destruction' written in it, with a smaller caption that clearly stated 'Not To Be Fucked With.'

Walking slowly over to the mute ascended woman, Xanna lifted her chin up with the telescopic pointer, incidentally nearly causing her to hyperventilate as she suddenly realised that she had an actual physical body again for some reason. "With all this and what you know of our personalities in mind, you shouldn't be asking yourself whether we can force you away...you should be asking yourself '_what if we decide to keep you around?_' instead. After all, an Empress can never know when she might need a personal cunt cleaner."

"Don't forget that this Emperor might also need a personal seed gargler. I have no idea what for, but I might need one." Naruto pitched in, having been enjoying the lecture immensely so far.

"You wouldn't." Ganos rasped with a suddenly dry mouth, distantly recalling how irritating physical bodies were with their involuntary reactions to emotional stimulus.

"Oh fine, you can be the _royal_ cunt clearner/seed gargler." Xanna huffed, as if making some great concession.

"Ah...Don't worry Ganos-san, I will show you how to perform your new duties. Xanna-sama has even given us matching uniforms for when Naruto-senpai molests us." Akitsu added with her usual monotone, adjusting the white schoolgirl shirt that looked as if it was about to rip in the attempt of containing her sizable chest.

While the ascended woman struggled to make a system reboot and get her brain functioning again, Xanna turned towards her husband and asked a question. "Mr. Uzumaki, what did you think of my lecture?"

"I think that if my academy instructors looked even a fraction as sexy as you do right now, I'd have failed the year more than just four times." Naruto admitted, giving his wife a full body leer.

"Detention for making bad passes at a teacher Mr. Uzumaki, I expect you to serve it to the _utmost of your ability_." She replied with a suggestively breathy tone, coincidentally pushing her chest out further.

Akitsu's eyes crinkled in slight consternation, wanting to join in on the obvious fun that was brewing but unsure of how to do it while staying in character. Inspiration struck as she thought over what little she knew of school and its rules, causing her to make an ice cube in her hands and chuck it at the still silent Ganos.

The ascended woman hissed in surprised pain the likes of which she hadn't felt for ten thousand years and clutched at her head. It didn't really hurt that bad, but it was yet another unwelcome reminder of her current circumstances.

"Akitsu, detention along with Mr. Uzumaki."

"Yay."

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Ganos Lal stared at the corpse that had her face.

The trio of perverts had gone off on their own, no doubt to satisfy their carnal urges, apparently completely forgetting about her in the process.

Once that had happened, she'd appeared on the other side of the planet, still dressed like a Japanese schoolgirl(not that she knew it, since that particular fetish was still some centuries off from being developed back on Earth).

It hadn't been hard to leave the body and return to an ascended state, but being forced back into physical form against her will had been a jarring experience to say the least, as was looking at the puppet of flesh and bones with her face that was now splayed rather lewdly on the ground.

Her mind no longer affected by biological factors, Ganos now realised that the whole thing had been just a very sick joke played on her, probably as retribution for holding them up in the first place.

In the end, the only thing she had learned was that they were powerful beyond imagination to be so easily capable of reshaping reality, creating mindless human bodies and forcing ascended beings into them, all for the sake of some disgusting sexual humor. Which also meant that there really wasn't a damn thing that the Ascended could do about them in any sort of direct fashion, and they hadn't had too much ground to stand on with their suggestion that they should leave the less evolved races alone to begin with.

Well, she had also learned that Naruto had apparently failed the same year four times in a row. Alteran education had long since abandoned such a teaching style, but she got the gist of it and it meant that someone with incomprehensible cosmic power had been the school dunce.

A disturbing thought to be sure, especially as it also implied that he had been mortal once upon a time.

Either way, she found herself surprisingly glad to be done with them and had no intention of repeating this experience, even if there were certain things said during that 'lecture' that she would have liked to inquire further about. It had as likely as not been just another joke and she doubted that answers would be forthcoming even if it wasn't.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

**Well, there goes the first chapter again.**

**In case anyone is wondering, the planet and star names have been shamelessly stolen from the game "Spore", which I played up to the space age for the exact purpose of doing so. Hurrah for that badass name generator.**

**Do tell me what you think by way of the handy review gimmick that is located just under this blatantly review fishing message :P.**


	2. Chapter 2

**Some people have been asking where the story stands as far as the timeline goes, but I won't give any precise dates, so as to give myself some leeway, but it is at least a few hundred years before the start of the series.**

**The chapter is extra long, which is why it's taken me so long to update. That, and I've been busy playing Borderlands 2 on co-op with a friend.**

**I'm in a hurry to get to work, so don't be surprised if there are a few grammatical errors. I'll fix em when I get back :P. I hope you enjoy the chapter.**

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Several weeks had passed since Naruto and Xanna's hostile takeover and things had more or less settled down. Or at least, that was their best estimate since the day on Erius was about twenty six hours and twenty minutes long…measuring time on a different planet was going to be a bitch.

Both he and Xanna were rather flummoxed as to how the Elemental Nations had a twenty four hour day just like Earth, which was something they hadn't considered up till now. In the end they wrote it off as a coincidence, because the idea that one world was some kind of weird offshoot of the other simply made no sense.

The human population of the planet had at first been terrified of them, fearing that their situation would worsen with the two scary looking horned people in charge, but much of that passed when they were told that they didn't have to work in the mines anymore.

Their population had always been small, just shy of a 100,000 when Zeus had first come to put them back into slavery under the Goa'uld and their culture hadn't been able to develop much due to the ban on reading and writing that all Goa'uld enforced. Despite being free for centuries, that edict had lingered long after the Goa'uld had abandoned Erius.

Zeus' arrival and subsequent ham handed changes had seen their population drop to a paltry 17,000 in the two hundred years that he'd been around. Forcing them to mine for naquadah, which they had absolutely no use for at their current level of development, utterly prevented any progress from being made and took manpower away from the much needed area of food production. In combination with poor hygiene this had caused far more death than all the direct killing that Zeus had done over the years.

The Jaffa had been somewhat more problematic. Their lives under Zeus had actually been fairly good, so there had been a some grumbling when they had been commanded to help the humans with any kind of manual labor they might need, such as building homes and difficult bits of farming. Naruto couldn't bring himself to feel any sympathy for their scuffed pride. The small Jaffa garrison on this planet had been left to make sure that the slaves continued mining and they had lived easy, if boring, lives on account of that.

Besides, it's not as if they had anything better to do and it would also help to fully integrate the humans and Jaffa so that they didn't consider themselves separate anymore. It's not as if the Jaffa were anything but a subspecies of Humanity anyway.

The other thing he had done in making sure they didn't get any stupid ideas about rebellion was to invite them to kill him and when they inevitably failed, he started teaching them how to fight worth a damn. Slowly but surely, they were all starting to see him as a warrior to be respected, more than just a god to be feared.

He hadn't been much impressed that most of their tactics seemed to consist of massed charges and reliance on overwhelming firepower. He wasn't sure if this was because there was no experienced Jaffa Master present to teach them better, or if this was fairly standard procedure for the Goa'uld.

He certainly wouldn't put it past them. 'Charge! Run them down!' sounded very dramatic, but it usually resulted in humiliating defeat unless there was no chance of defeat in the first place.

Or if the enemy was just as stupid with their tactics.

The only real incident that had occurred since their takeover had been due to the small priesthood that Zeus had used to peddle his religion. The priestesses of the Goa'uld were usually unwed Jaffa women in high standing who took care of the newly spawned Goa'uld who weren't yet ready for an implantation into a Jaffa. There was also the occasional human priest or priestess among the Jaffa females…these were humans who had fully bought into the whole 'Goa'uld divinity' thing and served the purposes of convincing others of the same, as well as helping the Jaffa priestesses safeguard the larval Goa'uld.

Naturally, they hadn't taken too well to the fact that he and Xanna were now in charge, or that Zeus and Hera were dead.

_Flashback no Jutsu!_

_"Stand with me brothers and sisters! Stand with me and let us march against these pretenders so that our lord Zeus may rise again!" A human priest was saying, sticking to the age old tradition of being as loud as possible so as to seem more convincing._

_With him stood a small number of Jaffa priestesses, wearing some very skimpy priestly garb that revealed the 'X' shaped opening of their stomach pouches where immature Goa'uld were held. They were standing in front of the temple that Zeus had ordered built long ago._

_Before them stood a congregation of humans and Jaffa who believed what he was saying and actually wanted Zeus back despite the fact that their quality of life had actually improved quite a bit since the Goa'uld had been know, the gullible ones._

_From nearby, Te'lok observed with a worried frown. Seeing Zeus get his head pulped had rather disabused him of the notion that his former master would be coming back, so he did not have any religious fervor to soothe his worry._

_lord Naruto and Lady Xanna had proven themselves to be remarkably even tempered and merciful, but he wouldn't soon forget the cruel smirk on the horned man's face as he crushed the symbiote's skull between his fingers or their casual talk of keeping the Goa'uld as pets to see how long it took them to resort to cannibalism. That smirk was the reason why he was anxious of their reaction to this gathering._

_They had already had him tell the priesthood to disband, but they wouldn't listen and he was hesitant to turn his weapon on them. Both because he didn't want to kill the Jaffa women(the human priest he didn't much care about, as the man was quite irritating) and because he was outnumbered._

_"I could swear that we had you tell these people to disband." A rumbling voice said mildly, causing Te'lok to freeze in fright._

_"They refuse to listen my lord, citing that you are impostors or demons and need to be driven out." Te'lok managed to say once he'd calmed down his racing heart._

_"It's the horns isn't it?" Xanna asked flatly from Te'lok's other side, nearly giving him another heart attack._

_"What?" The Jaffa asked, confused and somewhat frightened by her flat tone._

_"They think we're demons because of the horns." She elaborated._

_"Among other things yes."_

_"Figures." Naruto grumbled and turned towards the ranting human priest. "Hey, old guy!"_

_"It is the demons! Attack brothers!" The man cried. While not technically in charge of the priesthood, he did tend to be the loudest and he'd gotten the crowd fired up enough that they did as he said. Additionally, he'd been a member of Zeus' priesthood for a long time and had amassed quite a bit of favor with the Goa'uld due to his zealotry, in spite of the fact that Goa'uld tend to think of humans as inferior creatures. They tended to think of everyone but themselves as inferior creatures anyway._

_Te'lok winced at the brutally one sided ass kicking that the attackers received and felt relieved that they were at least left alive. He doubted that they would still be breathing if the horned man was truly upset._

_Naruto approached one of the Jaffa priestesses and addressed her. "Zeus isn't coming back, go home and think about what you want to do with your life."_

_"LIES, HE WI-" The ranting priest was cut off by a backhand that sent him spinning into the walls of the temple._

_Naruto made a mental note to keep an eye on that one and have him killed if necessary. Nothing was more annoying than someone that had their verbal caps lock pressed all the time._

_"My life is dedicated to the service of my lord Zeus. He will rise again and destroy you for your insolence." She said tremulously, clearly afraid of him but unwilling to back down._

_Naruto bit his lip to keep from making a crack about was really going to rise in response to her skimpy outfit. Now was seriously not the time. He managed to restrain himself, barely._

_He also saw that she wasn't going to be convinced by words alone, so he placed his hand over her pouch opening in preparation._

_The priestess clenched her eyes shut, expecting those claws to be plunged into her pouch and kill the larval Goa'uld she carried, poisoning her and causing her to die in agony. Such a death was often given to traitors or those who greatly offended the gods and she had feared that it would happen to her for daring to stand against the newcomers, but she did not regret staying true to her faith._

_Just as she had been praying to Zeus to see her soul safely to the other side, a feeling of warmth spread from her abdomen, suffusing her whole body._

_Blinking in confusion, she saw that the horned man had already turned away and was now giving the outer supporting pillar of the temple a constemplating look._

_Glancing down at her stomach, she let out a surprised gasp at the sight of her unblemished skin. No X shaped cut, no symbiote pouch and more distressingly, she couldn't feel the larval Goa'uld she carried anymore either._

_Her head snapped back towards the temple when she heard the cracking of stone and watched in shock as Naruto tore it apart with his bare hands._

_"Perhaps this will convince you that these worms are not gods." Xanna said from the other side and standing next to her was the container full of fluid that held the immature symbiotes who weren't yet ready for implantation into a Jaffa._

_There were many cries of shock as black flames burst into life under it and a webwork of chains further out prevented any approach._

_"If they are truly gods, they will escape and if they are not…..they will boil." The horned woman said indifferently and walked away._

_Normally, Naruto would have objected to the killing of children, which these larval Goa'uld technically were, but their genetic memory precluded the chance of them being born innocent. Thanks to that, they inherited the combined evil and insanity of all their ancestors. In light of that, they were never innocent and Naruto had no compuction leaving them to be boiled alive._

_While his wife had been setting up her little show, Naruto had repeated his process of healing away the symbiote pouches of the other three priestesses, not bothering to remove the Goa'uld first he'd been planning to merely dissolve them, but he'd found a much more useful thing to do with them._

_After that he left as well, taking Te'lok with him and telling him that he'd found a way to let the Jaffa keep much of their enhanced abilities without the need for having a Goa'uld in their gut._

_Flashback no Jutsu: Kai!_

Naturally, all of those larval Goa'uld had boiled to death, even though a few stubborn souls had tried to save them.

Things had been more or less quiet since that day.

The annoyingly loud human priest had continued trying to get people to rebel until he'd slipped on the stairs in his home and broken his neck. A tragic accident to be sure.

More and more Jaffa were becoming convinced to agree to having the same thing done to them as had been done to the three priestesses, now that they were assured that they wouldn't be losing the good health and longevity that the Prim'tah granted them.

It had also silenced the dissidents who still believed that Zeus was a god and would one day return when he'd showed a few of the Jaffa how to use the kara kesh hand device since they now had naquadah in their blood.

They were quite clumsy with it, but the fact that they _could_ use it put a lot of doubt in their minds over the supposed divinity of the Goa'uld.

Naruto personally doubted that the changes he'd made to their bodies by using the Goa'uld they'd once carried would transfer to their children, but it might happen. He wasn't a geneticist and had no idea whether their kids would be born Jaffa, human or whatever he'd just turned them into. All he'd basically done was mash the Goa'uld together with their own bodies without making changes to their genome. Not exactly a procedure one would expect to be survivable, but he was a god so fuck logic.

None of that was currently on Naruto's mind however, because he was fiddling with Zeus' hand device to kill time instead.

It was a bit of a tight fit on him, since his hands, fingers and forearms were a good deal larger, making the ribbon like golden wrapping a bit strained around his forearm, but it still fit. The bigger problem were the caps that were supposed to fit over the fingers. For one thing, he'd needed to put the claws away to even attempt getting them on and they still only barely fit.

The kara kesh was one of the few technologies of the Goa'uld that was at least passably impressive. It could throw out a wave of force, generate a personal energy shield and torturously slowly kill a single individual. For such a small thing it had quite a bit of utility, all without taking away the use of the left hand of its wearer.

Its most impressive feature however was the cognitive interface that allowed it to be activated mentally. It wasn't a particularly sophisticated one, responding more to willpower than actual thoughts, but it was impressive nonetheless.

Normally, the kara kesh required its user to have naquadah in their bloodstream to power it, but Naruto was easily capable of generating the energy to activate it, as well as forcing the device to respond to his will.

On a whim, he decided to use it and see what happened if he overpowered it.

The red-orange emmiter jewel in the palm of the device glowed as it let out a wave of force far more powerful than it was designed for, after which it exploded. Had he been a normal man, such a thing might have cost him his hand, as it was he merely stared at the shattered jewel for a moment and then shrugged.

Next, he turned to look at the wall at which he'd aimed the device and grinned sheepishly. It was hardly the first wall that he or Xanna had knocked down during their redecorating of the palace, but it was the first accidental one.

"Didn't like that wall anyway." He muttered to himself. "It's like the baby version of a Shinra Tensei."

He was suddenly assaulted by the mental image of a Goa'uld going around saying 'Shinra Tensei!' and 'Know Pain!' while blasting people with this thing, making him wonder if there was some kind of relationship between being able to throw people through the air with waves of force fired from the palm and delusions of godhood. Also, the Goa'uld could make their hosts eyes glow, while Pain/Nagato had the Rinnegan.

Maybe the Rinnegan wielder had been a Goa'uld?

Shaking his head to clear it of the idiotic thought, Naruto muttered to himself again. "Too much dimension hopping."

Deciding to fiddle with something else, he reached for the hand held healing device, when the voice of his wife intruded upon his tinkering.

"Husband, what _are_ you doing?"

"Fiddling."

"To what end? You know that this fledgeling empire of ours doesn't have the technological base to do anything with those toys yet."

"Because I'm friggin bored!" He said, throwing his hands up in exasperation. "The only thing we've really done in the past few weeks since boiling those Goa'uld babies alive was tell people to wash more thoroughly and I spend my mornings teaching sweaty men how to beat the crap out of each other better. I need to _do_ something."

"Then how about you come do me while Akitsu does you?" Xanna suggested, nibbling lightly on his ear.

Naruto shivered and felt himself responding to the suggestion, but he still forced his mind back on track. "Your attempts at distracting me are…..100% effective, but I'm still feeling rather superfluous as a leader if I'm just redecorating the palace." He finished, waving at the wall he'd collapsed earlier.

He couldn't really bring himself to seriously call himself an Emperor at the moment, since they ruled the equivalent of a large town at the very best.

Xanna hummed and leaned her chin on his shoulder, staring down at the pieces of a dissembled Ma'tok plasma staff weapon. Before moving on to the kara kesh, Naruto had appparently been scrutinizing the power source of the staff, which was a small liquid naquadah energy cell. Very efficient, and it looked vaguely like glowing green gatorade.

Xanna wouldn't have been surprised if her idiot husband had eventually decided to drink it 'just to see what happened'. Of course, nothing much _would_ happen due to his godhood, but he'd have probably done it anyway.

Aside from the staff was also the healing device which he had been about to reach for and the overly elaborate device that Hera had worn wrapped around her stomach. It had a similar, though larger, jewel as the hand device, but with a very different purpose in mind.

A rather nasty thing that was, used for a quick and dirty transformation of a regular human into a Jaffa, by way of creating a symbiote pouch on the stomach. Such a Jaffa wouldn't have the same strength or endurance of a regular one, but over time the hormones and various chemicals that the Goa'uld would secrete from its skin would work to give that human a considerable physical boost as they were absorbed through the slimy walls of the symbiote pouch, all at the low, low price of their immune system, which would be supplanted by the symbiote's healing abiliy. Xanna had to wonder if any of the Jaffa ever thought about the fact that they owed their enhanced abilities to what was basically Goa'uld shit.

Probably not. That would require some education.

"People generally do not react well to sudden changes, especially those on which they have no influence. We needed to give them time to adapt to the fact that we will rule from now on, as well as to our appearance." She finally said.

"Yeah I know, but still-" He started to say, but was interrupted.

"However, I think that enough time has passed that we can begin directing progress."

"You mean teaching them to read and write?" Naruto asked.

"Indeed." She confirmed.

They had talked about this earlier and eventually decided with some reluctance that English would likely be the best choice, as it was the simplest language they knew. Both of them were rather fond of Japanese, but the Japanese alphabet was far too complex to be practical when there were simpler alternatives available. They _could_ have started teaching Japanese with the English alphabet, but that would be silly and kind of miss the point of using Japanese in the first place.

Neither one of them even considered keeping the Goa'uld language around, it was just too stupid.

"We never did decide who we were going to teach so that they can pass it on though." Naruto pointed out.

"Indeed, but there was one group of people that we overlooked in our original discussion because they hadn't showed up yet." Xanna said with some smugness at his puzzled face.

Naruto scratched at his face and tried to think of what group of people they could have possibly overlooked. It wasn't as if there were many of them really. Since Zeus had forced most of the men into mining for naquadah, that left the women and children to work the farms and grow food. Any other pursuits had been abandoned due to the need for survival and it would take a little while before people started working more specialised crafts again.

Now that the men had returned home, they had taken up the farming again and with the way that he had forced food production to be a joint venture between Jaffa and humans, it looked as if there would be plenty enough food for everyone in the future.

"Not all of the women working the farms had husbands Naruto and few of those had farms of their own." Xanna hinted.

"Ah, I see." He said in realisation. "The prostitutes."

Prostitution had been a fact of life pretty much everywhere that Naruto had ever been and it had been a fact of life throughout history as well. Since most societies were male dominated due to the need for hard labor, which included the one they'd just taken over, a certain number of single women inevitably found themselves in a position where they had no choice but to sell their bodies in exchange for money, or trade them for food and shelter if there was no monetary system in place.

17,000 people was plenty enough of a population that it produced women who had no one to help them and couldn't survive in any other way.

"There are none quite yet, but I do not doubt that prostitution will indeed appear soon." Xanna confirmed. "While you are teaching them to read and write as well as basic mathemathics, I will be teaching the farmers better farming techniques, the current ones will be woefully inadequate once the population expands."

"Don't be too hard on them now." He snickered, imagining his wife losing patience with some sceptical farmer who thought he knew better, because that was how his daddy did it and his daddy's daddy and his daddy before him.

Though he supposed that would be 'mommy', since it had been the women working the fields for nearly two centuries now. Two centuries by the standards of Earth in any case, since they still had no idea how long a year on Erius was…..measuring time was going to be a bitch.

"That will depend on how quickly they start listening to me."

Naruto snickered some more and got off his chair with a stretch. "Well, I guess I'm going to find me some whores.".

He always did like prostitutes, even if he didn't like their proffession.

"They're not prostitutes yet Naruto, just women who will soon have no other recourse."

"Close enough."

"And send some Jaffa to do it. You're an Emperor now, you have people for these kinds of things."

"Blasphemy! What kind of man doesn't even pick up his own whores?"

"Firstly, the kind that has other people to do it for him and secondly, do you _really_ want to start rumors about how you collected a group of women, took them to the palace and ate them?"

"That sounds awesome!"Naruto exclaimed and then leered. "Maybe I really will-"

"Finish that far-too-obvious innuendo and you won't get to eat me or Akitsu for the next two days." Xanna cut him off, smirking.

"That's way too long!" He protested, aghast.

"Indeed it is, but I am willing to make this sacrifice if it keeps you at least semi-amusing." She said magnanimously.

"I so totally am amusing." Naruto sulked.

Xanna's eye twitched, knowing that he had just used the speech pattern one might expect to hear from a ditzy cheerleader because he knew it annoyed her. Honestly, she'd made _one_ crack about how he looked like a dumb, blonde valley girl because of his hair and he takes it as an invitation to act like it occasionally.

"But really, ate them? Why would people think that?"

"Take a look at your teeth in a mirror and then consider the reality distorting powers of gossip."

"Good point." He conceded wryly. "Still not sure why I should care though."

Xanna suppressed an eyeroll at how obtuse he was being. It wasn't that she cared for anyone else's opinion either, but there was no need to cause problems when they could be so easily avoided.

"Because husband….." She whispered, leaning closer to him. "…..I'm telling you to."

With a growl, Naruto grabbed her and slammed her back first onto the table where his little tinkering projects were, sending them skittering to the floor.

"Weren't you going to 'pick up some whores'?" She purred into his ear but used her legs to pull him closer.

"**Later.**" He growled so deeply as to be barely understandable, already naked and pushing inside her.

Xanna shivered in pleasure at his tone, having always liked how his unique Senjutsu had changed his voice. She let out a rumbling moan of her own and clenched her pelvic muscles hard enough to bend steel as he entered her fully.

Yes indeed, farmers and almost-prostitutes could wait.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

In the end, Naruto had been _persuaded_ to send Te'lok and a few other Jaffa to around town to give anyone that seemed to be down on their luck an offer of employment.

Just as Xanna had predicted, the vast majority of these were indeed women. The current society being what it was, if you didn't have big enough muscles, then chances were that there wasn't going to be much for you to do. Before his arrival, they had been working on farms that didn't need them anymore and they had nobody else to either work for or take care of them. A few of them had even worked in the mines and had even less.

Mixed in with the women were a few men who had worked in the mines their entire lives and had no other skills, no family and absolutely nothing to do.

All in all a group numbering twenty five had showed up. While Naruto figured that there were more of them that had been too wary to step up, it was still a surprisingly small number. If nothing else, being oppressed by a Goa'uld got people to take care of each other, with these being the few exceptions.

Perhaps the most surprising addition to the group were the four priestesses who had been the first to have the whole 'mash up the Goa'uld with your body' thing done to them. From what he'd heard over the past weeks, they'd been floating about from one Jaffa household to another and basically living on charity because he and Xanna had put a stop to any silly tributes being given to the temple.

As opposed to the rather dirty and disheveled appearance of the others, the four of them looked much better, being clean and wearing the same skimpy priestess outfits as the last time he'd seen them.

"Well I certainly didn't expect to see you here." He commented, looking at the four Jaffa women. "What's your name and what can I do for you?"

The former priestess took a deep breath, kneeled and spoke. "I am Mara my lord and we are here to pledge our allegiance to you."

The past few weeks had been difficult for the four of them. Without the tributes given to the temple, they had nothing to live on and had been forced to rely on the generosity of their fellow Jaffa. At first, it hadn't been too difficult to find a few who still supported Zeus, but those numbers had dwindled by the day until none were left.

With the evidence mounting that Zeus would not be returning and that his godhood was not what he'd claimed it to be, they were forced to re-evaluate their beliefs. They couldn't even decry the newcomers as evil tyrants because they had only done things that helped the community. True, more than one warrior had grumbled over being forced to do manual labor because they felt that it diminished them somehow, but they did it anyway and it was starting to show. The city, Hesa as the humans called it, while still looking rather haphazard, was visibly improving.

Eventually, their convinctions in the divinity of Zeus had been shaken and collapsed, leaving them adrift and without purpose, so they had come together and decided to convert over to these new gods. They looked terrifying, but they did seem to have good intentions and they didn't as of yet have any priests or priestesses of their own. Perhaps they could fulfill that role for them.

Seeing the four priestesses kneeling quickly got the humans present to do the same, long years of conditioning telling them that failure to do so would be met with a Jaffa guard smacking you across the knees from behind at the very least.

Naruto rolled his eyes and sighed in exasperation at all the kneeling. He would have been more impressed if they tried to slug him across the face, but he knew that wasn't likely to happen any time soon. "Don't do that. Seriously, get up, I didn't ask you to be here because I had the urge to see someone grovel."

Many confused glances were exchanged as the group got on their feet. Zeus had so far been the only authority figure that any of them had ever known and he'd always demanded that people kneel in his presence, so encountering someone that was apparently annoyed by it was more than a little confusing.

"I'll just get right to the point." Naruto said, wanting to avoid any more displays like that one and being far more comfortable when someone was trying to stab him. Why was he doing this Emperor thing again? Oh right, because he had to go and adopt a bunch of little cuties who just so happened to need it…..and because his wife had decided that they were going to do it. "I'm going to teach you all how to read and write."

"But it is forbidden!" One of the other priestesses protested instinctually.

"Not anymore it isn't." He replied flippantly. "In fact, I'm hoping to make it mandatory for everyone within a year."

Hopefully a year was at least a vaguely similarly long time on Erius as it was on Earth, otherwise he might have just said something very dumb.

"What about us my lord?" Mara asked.

"What about you?" Naruto asked back quizzically. "I'm not going to force you to learn if you don't want to, but keep in mind that eventually, I _will_require that everyone knows how to read and write and more besides."

"But will you not give us instructions on how to spread worship of you and Lady Xanna to the people?" She asked, just as puzzled as him.

"Don't be ridiculous." Naruto chuckled, finally understanding what the whole thing was about. "They can decide that for themselves."

"But what if they reject you or refuse to believe in your divinity?" Mara asked in shocked bafflement.

The humans present were just as shocked, albeit for slightly different reasons.

"They can believe that I'm a moose for all I care, it's not like it would change the truth." He shrugged.

"What is a moose?" She asked in puzzlement.

"A large, hairy, four legged, plant eating animal with very big antlers." He explained. "You don't have those on this planet?"

"Not that I know of my lord." The former priestess replied a bit numbly, unable to quite process the idea of a god that didn't care whether the people he ruled compared him to an animal. Under Zeus, such a thing would have been punished with a torturous execution.

"Crap, now I need to find a new horned animal." Naruto muttered to himself. And he'd gotten so fond of the moose comparison too.

"How about goats, are there goats?"

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Some months had passed since the day that Naruto had taken up teaching a group of humans and four Jaffa women the basics of education. At least, that was his best guess. Being on another planet was playing merry hell with his sense of time and he just knew that it was going to keep doing that for a while.

Xanna found his preoccupation with that issue endlessly amusing. She of course had long since waved the whole thing off as unimportant, deeming herself far too old to be bothered about such things. He knew she was right, that it wasn't important, but it still bugged him.

Either way, since then he'd taught them the English alphabet, basic math, the metric system of measurement, basic scientific reasoning, as well as started them on the English language itself. They were picking things up fairly quickly, though he was cheating a bit with the language and sort of mentally 'massaging' it into them to speed it up. He _really_ wanted to switch away from Goa'uld as soon as possible, not to mention that many of the humans spoke some derivative of Ancient Greek instead of Goa'uld.

Wouldn't it be convenient if the whole Universe spoke English?

Unsurprisingly, once it had gone around that his students were getting free meals, could use the extra large baths and could explore the palace if they really wanted to(something that his wife had not been too pleased about), his 'class' had expanded considerably. Enough that he'd knocked down some more walls to have a big enough room for them all.

He knew perfectly well that many of those coming over were doing it only for the perks, but it didn't matter since they were still learning and the more people he could educate now, the faster it would spread and the faster they could stop being so freaking primitive and therefore _boring_. There were even some Jaffa getting in on it, though not very many.

Still, he was intending to order that a school be built soon and making attendance mandatory for all children under a certain age. Mara and the other three former priestesses at least had the makings of decent teachers, being used to public speaking and the dissemination of information.

In a move that surprised him and caused him to feel the unfamiliar-but-very-unlikeable feeling of guilt, Akitsu had asked if he could teach her too, causing him to remember that she had only ever been taught the very basics of….anything really. So he'd set some more time aside to teach her too, or else had a clone teach the others while he taught her since she didn't like crowds. She was smart, picked things up fast and having lived in Japan during the year 2020 had caused her to pick up a lot of small bits that let her progress faster than the others.

Xanna sometimes joined him for Akitsu's lessons or outright took over. He'd once asked her if she'd like to take over teaching the others too sometimes, only to get a flat stare in return, as if she couldn't believe he'd just asked that. One of these days he was going to mellow her out enough that she was going to be willing to tolerate the presence of regular humans for longer than ten or twenty minutes.

But it would not be this day….and possibly not this century either.

He was starting to see why her previous two attempts at ruling had failed so spectacularly though. It was hard to rule over a population that you actively disliked, especially if you had a volcanically volatile temper.

Things were progressing as well as one might imagine, more and more people were becoming literate and they had already started making paper and writing utensils available. At the moment it was still just a feather of some bird and an ink bottle, but he couldn't very well start introducing them to ball point pens.

Well he could, but Xanna had firmly vetoed that idea, saying that she didn't want to skip ahead, so he had done it the old fashioned way after his wife had tossed him a book about how ink was produced in ancient civilizations, apparently having expected the issue.

Naruto got the distinct feeling that she saw the whole thing as a very long term game and wanted to limit 'cheating' (read: use of divine power to sidestep problems), to a minimum. She'd even told him that displays like the one with the boiling Goa'uld were to be avoided in the future and if they use their power, it was to be as subtle as possible…just enough to keep people from forgetting what they were.

She even had a very good argument that he actually agreed with, but he still didn't like it. Yes, the more they used their power to help people and make their lives easier, the more they would come to rely on that instead of doing anything for themselves. If they kept on doing everything for the people with their power, then they'd end up supporting the entire society, and it would collapse into shambles the moment they stopped.

A good, solid, indisputable argument. Naruto was still sure that she just didn't want her fun spoiled.

But that didn't make him any less restless and bored. The whole teaching thing had settled into a routine and he'd soon ask the three former priestesses if they could start taking students of their own.

The town of Hesa was starting to look a lot more respectable nowadays. With plenty of food, shelter, enough free time and their residual fear of him and Xanna having dissipated completely when 'the other shoe' never showed up, people did what came naturally.

They fucked like rabbits.

This of course led to there being a great many pregnant women around, since the concept of birth control didn't exist here, but with a base population of just over 17,000 it was going to take a long ass fucking time for that number to climb into the millions, much less the billions. Even longer since he'd changed the definition of 'adult woman' from 'when she gets her first period' to '18 years old'.

Or his best guess at 18 at any rate. Really, he'd just grabbed a girl that looked to be in her late teens and said 'kids stop being kids when they're as old as her'. Fortunately, he was a master at guessing women's ages just by looking at them.

Wouldn't it have been convenient if the whole Universe measured time the same way as Earth? Sure would save him a lot of head scratching.

All this and more went through his thoughts as he lay in bed with Xanna and Akitsu, idly drawing circles on their backs.

"If you are so bored, then take some Jaffa through the stargate to another Goa'uld controlled planet and abduct the human population." Xanna murmured languidly into his neck. "It would help to widen our rather limited gene pool at least. But take no more than five thousand, as we lack the food surplus to take in any more than that."

Even five thousand was a fairly generous estimate and they would likely have to cheat a bit by multiplying the food stores when people weren't looking.

Naruto stopped his circle drawing as he thought of the idea, getting a displeased mewl from Akitsu and a growl from Xanna, causing him to restart it. "That's a great idea. We get to speed up our population growth, the presence of multiple different languages is going to force people into switching over to English sooner and we put some variety into the gene pool as you said."

"Just make sure you don't leave any traces that the Goa'uld could use to track us back here, that would be annoying."

Naruto huffed a bit irritably at that. "It still seems kind of ridiculous that we're skulking around like this when we could effortlessly kill them all right now."

"You took your sweet time with your little sisters, I want us to take our sweet time with the building of our empire." She countered.

"Doesn't seem like quite the same thing." He grumbled. "This is going to take centuries."

"Do tell what other pressing business you have?"

He couldn't argue with that, even if he wanted to. There really was _nothing_ else that he had to do, he was just being impatient and he missed having the Sekirei around. There was nothing else for it though, he didn't want to bring them out into a time where they wouldn't even have a modern toilet, much less the various amusements that they had gotten so used to on Earth. Not to mention that many of them were still quite hung up on finding their 'destined one' and the current selection was rather lacking.

Kusano was going to hate him so much when he kept scaring off her boyfriends(or girlfriends) because they weren't good enough. He could hardly wait.

A hand gently fondling his testicles distracted him from his glum thoughts of how long it was going to be before would be able to let the Sekirei out of temporal stasis and he looked down at Akitsu with a raised eyebrow.

"I thought you were tired?"

"Ah…." Her habitual pause before finishing her sentences was interrupted by a yawn. "…no."

"You little liar." Naruto chuckled.

Akitsu pouted a bit and then looked at him with a far too innocent puzzled look. "Master can't get it up?"

Xanna burst out laughing and rolled off him, laughing even harder when he gave her a sour look.

"Yeah yeah, laugh it up." He grumbled, but couldn't quite keep down a grin. It had been a good joke.

"Well husband, that sounds like a challenge to me or else I've never heard a challenge before." Xanna said with a final few chuckles.

"It's okay if you can't." Akitsu offered before he could respond, causing another bout of laughter to erupt from the horned woman on his other side.

"That cheek of yours is getting out of control." He commented before spinning the Ice Sekirei around and demonstrating that he had no problems like the ones she'd implied.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXX

It was just over two weeks after being falsely accused of impotence that Naruto had the right target picked out. He'd needed to slog through the disaster that the Goa'uld called an operating system on the Ha'tak mothership that Zeus had ever so generously donated to them and then prepare once he had a target picked out.

Don't get him wrong, he was seriously impressed with how idiot proof the thing was. He'd tried using an Apple made computer once and come to the conclusion that it was a fairly simple thing once you got the hang of it, but the Goa'uld computer put that to shame. All you needed was to know the language and a very basic understanding of how the tech functioned to work it.

The problem was that he wasn't trying to fly the ugly fucking thing, he was trying to get information out of it, which turned out to be a bit harder because it was disorganized as shit.

Not a lot harder admittedly, since the Goa'uld had apparently never heard of things such as 'passwords', 'firewalls', 'encryption' or anything else that might even remotely be called computer security. They just sort of assumed that nobody would ever try or even think of hacking their systems, so the only difficulty was actually _finding_ the list of gate addresses and planetary descriptions and then picking the right one.

To be fair, other Goa'uld apparently _didn't_ think of it, but Naruto resolved to make them bitterly regret that oversight once they finally started a war against them.

But that was far into the future, now it was time to launch a raiding party.

The planet in question was called Saral and it was provisionally ruled by the Goa'uld Banaded. Provisionally, because Banaded was an underling of Ra for all intents and purposes. He'd apparently tried to establish his own domain at some point, only to fail miserably and ended up asking the Supreme System Lord for protection.

Nowadays, he was _technically_ an independent Planet Lord allied with Ra, but in practice he was just another underling.

"Alright men, you know the plan." Naruto spoke as he paced in front of the assembled Jaffa, a force of a mere sixty warriors. "This Banana guy isn't expecting us and he apparently hasn't been involved in any fighting for centuries, so we're going to just walk right in like a bunch of badasses and take over. Any questions?"

"What if they fire upon us immediately when we step through the gate my lord?" Te'lok stepped forward and asked, having gotten used to the fact that he could speak his mind over such concerns without fear of reprisal by now.

"Then we screw the plan and storm the walls." Naruto stated airily. "But don't worry, I don't expect anything of the sort to happen."

The Jaffa nodded and stepped back, most of his worries allayed. He was still worried about being cut down as soon as they stepped through the stargate, but Naruto seemed confident that it wouldn't happen.

Then again, Naruto was never anything less than confident, so it was hard to judge whether he was really certain of success or if he just didn't contemplate failure.

There was one other issue that his fellow Jaffa had asked him to raise with their new god though. "My lord, though your plan is quite cunning, we cannot help but feel that it is...dishonorable...to attack Banaded in such a manner."

"Honor is all well and good for regulating your personal behavior, but trying to apply honor to warfare is the domain of the stupid and the dead." Naruto stated firmly before continuing in a lighter tone of voice. "Since you aren't dead and you don't strike me as stupid, I'm sure you'll see the wisdom of using some subterfuge."

"Yes my lord." Te'lok agreed, though his voice was still somewhat dubious, as were the expressions of more than one of his fellow Jaffa. Cunning battlefield tactics and stratagems was one thing, this outright duplicity was quite another though and they couldn't help being leery of it.

Another Jaffa stepped forward before Te'lok could consider the issue much further, bringing forth another question. "My lord, what is a banana?"

"It's a delicious, curved yellow fruit wrapped in an easy to remove peel that turns yellow and starts developing brown spots when it ripens." Naruto lectured patiently. He _had_ encouraged them to ask questions after all.

"And what is a...'bad ass'? Why would we walk into enemy territory like bad donkeys?"

Naruto pursed his lips at that one and resisted the urge to facepalm. Not a single banana or moose to be found, yet of course there were donkeys, horses, sheep, chickens, oxen and other such shit applenty. He and Xanna were actually having to steal certain fruits from other dimensions for their smoothies or outright create them themselves, all the while resisting the urge to introduce foreign flora to Erius' ecosystem for the sake of convenience.

"It's a way of describing someone that is distinctly tough or powerful and has nothing at all to do with donkeys." He finally said, choosing to oversimplify something that they couldn't possibly understand without some exposure to late 20th or early 21st century Earth.

The Jaffa nodded, satisfied with the explanation. It wasn't the first time that their new leader had said something that made no sense whatsoever and they'd gotten used to that particular quirk. It made him hard to understand at times, but the martial arts training and combat drills he put them through had them regarding him with the respect they would have given to a venerable Jaffa Master by now, so a few quirks were easily dismissed eccentricies.

This latest plan to attack Saral being a perfect example of said eccentricies.

Usually, when a Goa'uld planned an attack, it was done with ships and armies and nobody would have been mad enough to attack a place like Saral, which was a trade planet deep in Ra's territory. No mothership could possibly hope to reach it undetected and no army of sufficient size could come through the stargate fast enough to overwhelm the defenses before Ra's ships arrived to reinforce the defenders and blast the invaders to dust from orbit.

Additionally, there was nothing on Saral that would be worth making such a risky assault.

But Naruto had no intention of being so obvious even if he could easily overwhelm the defenses all by himself. He could easily overwhelm the entire Goa'uld Hegemony all by himself for that matter, but Xanna had nixed that idea before it could even properly form. Besides, it wouldn't have helped much anyway, since his goal was to create a civilization for his newly adopted little sister where they could be safe and happy and the Galaxy was in general terms, a shithole.

Oh sure, there were planets out there that weren't Goa'uld dominated and fairly advanced, but he'd just be back to square one of needing to conquer them first and that would cause more problems than it would solve. The thought of simply trusting them to be decent and not try to exploit the Sekirei never even entered his mind.

So here he was, standing in front of sixty Jaffa who now had the spiral marking of the Uzumaki clan on their foreheads and he was going to be introduced as 'Uzu, the Great and Powerful' who had come to trade with Banaded.

Naruto had snickered quite heavily as he'd given them those instructions, remembering the super idiots from two dimensions ago and the cruel prank he'd played on them. Good times.

The Jaffa were quite confused by his mirth, as they thought that the name sounded rather impressive. Additionally, having the symbol of their god on their forehead was almost comfortingly familiar, even if it was only temporary. Yes, Naruto had already talked them through the idea that the Goa'uld branded their warriors like this to instill a sense of ownership, but at the end of the day it had been all they'd ever known and adjusting to new things took time.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Banaded was an old Goa'uld, old enough to have been on Tau'ri before Ra had banished them all from the first world. He had been a minor Goa'uld then and had carved a small niche for himself as a ram-god, which was the symbol that his Jaffa still carried.

He was actually still a minor Goa'uld, but unlike in his younger days when he had thirsted for a higher position, he had now made peace with the fact that he would always be a minor Goa'uld. Once, long ago, he had managed to acquire a Queen and aspired to rise to the rank of System Lord.

Those aspirations came crashing down when he found himself severely outmatched in military cunning by his rivals and unable to keep the ambitions of his underlings in check. His Queen had betrayed him in exchange for a better position with a rival and eventually been killed by rivals of her own, while his own forces had suffered crippling loses, forcing him to beg for the protection of the Supreme System Lord.

Ra had agreed and placed him as the Planet Lord of some forsaken backwater, with a contingent of his personal Jaffa keeping an eye him in case of treachery.

Banaded had seethed at the humiliation of it for some time before calming down and accepting his new position and eventually discovering that he was actually content with being a minor Goa'uld in service to a more powerful one.

Ra had eventually noticed the shift, as well as his skill in planetary administration and assigned him to the governance of Saral, which was a minor trade planet generally dealing in domestic slaves, crafts slaves, pleasure slaves, clothing materials and foodstuff, mostly various grains. Ra had also pulled back his own Jaffa and allowed Banaded to use his own eventually. As of yet, no large deposits of any precious metals had been found on Saral, most especially not naquadah, but it did boast some very fertile land and mild seasons.

In short, there was no reason to attack it and every reason to leave it be, meaning that the only danger came from its human population. However, unlike Zeus who had never been a Planet Lord and was terribly inept at managing the human population, Banaded knew that you couldn't just demand endless labor from slaves and expect to get optimal results.

He had presided over Saral for centuries now and had increased its profits considerably, all the while keeping the human population in check with a minimum of productivity reducing bloodshed. While still needing to work long hours in the fields and suffering the minor league oppression perpetrated by Banaded, it was having their most beautiful sons and daughters taken from them to be trained as pleasure slaves that incited thougts of rebellion among the humans.

Banaded managed to keep most of this contained through judicious use of religious propaganda, painting it out to be an honor to serve the gods in such a way and if that didn't work, demonstrations of superior force.

The only ambitions he had left were to be given control over one of the larger trade hubs in Ra's territory and maintaining his current safe, hedonistic lifestyle.

When his Jaffa had come to tell him that the Great and Powerful Uzu had come to do trade, bringing with him sixty Jaffa, all carrying crates full of naquadah, he had felt that his goal of becoming Ra's chief Planet Lord was just a bit closer than he'd thought it might be. Naquadah was the cornerstone of all Goa'uld technology and was always in high demand. A smallish trade planet like Saral usually didn't have that amount of the rare metal pass through it in a year.

He had never heard of a Goa'uld called Uzu before, but that didn't mean much and just about every Goa'uld introduced themselves with some grand title anyway. It was entirely possible that he was an ambitious newcomer that usually operated on the other side of the Galaxy and had come to Saral to make a trade without his rivals noticing. His name certainly sounded as if he'd come from the regimes of either the Shinto pantheon or perhaps the ancient System Lord Yu-huang Shang Ti, which _were_ established in those parts.

It was when he caught sight of the host that Uzu was using however, that Banaded began to think that his ascension to the coveted position of chief Planet Lord in Ra's service was within arms reach.

Uzu's host was a massive male of a hitherto unknown species that bore a striking similarity to humans, except for the distinctly predatory eyes, claws, fangs and the great horns on his head.

A human of such size, physique and glorious hair color would have been an invaluable commodity as a host to many Goa'uld who preffered their hosts to be physically imposing. The fact that he was clearly _not_ human would only have further raised his value. There was no small amount of Goa'uld who would still be using Unas hosts if the lizardlike species that shared a homeworld with the Goa'uld hadn't started adapting their massively powerful immune systems to reject possession. A new, physically powerful species that could be taken as hosts would appeal to many.

Sokar, for example, would have traded exorbitant amounts of naquadah to get his hands on such a menacing looking specimen, probably even at the cutthroat rates that Goa'uld who were not in Ra's service incurred when trading on Saral. Too bad that he'd been banished recently, but there were bound to be others who would want one.

This of course all hinged on whether Uzu could be convinced to either reveal where he had come across this new species, or failing that if he could be bargained with to provide a few. Banaded strongly suspected that Uzu had only recently risen to power exactly because he had discovered this unknown but impressive looking species. Promises to provide other Goa'uld with such creatures for whatever purpose they wanted them would have been enough to gain him many things in exchange for nearly nothing.

Of course he'd be facing obliteration from irate Goa'uld if he failed to deliver on his promises but that was just business as usual.

Despite his greed at the chance of an extremely profitable trade, he was still wary. Mostly he only traded with other underlings of Ra, with the occasional visitor who'd come from the dominion of another System Lord or an independent minor Goa'uld, all of which brought with them only a small contingent of warriors.

Sixty was a number well beyond what he was comfortable hosting, even if Uzu did have the excuse of needing them to carry all those crates. He'd already had his First Prime check the crates to make sure there really was naquadah in there and had been gratified to know that they were indeed full of the valuable ore.

He had still reassigned many of his warriors to watch the newcomers however. You could never be too careful, even if Uzu's Jaffa had only come armed with Zat'nik'tels instead of staff weapons and even if only a small number of them were armed.

Banaded had no idea that Naruto considered the Ma'tok staff weapon to be a cumbersome piece of crap that wasn't worth using. Sure, it was a plasma weapon, which was certainly the most advanced firearm he'd ever seen, but its design was just so _stupid_.

There was no practical reason whatsoever for shaping it like a staff, not when it's component parts could fit into a much smaller casing. It was too long and too heavy to aim effectively and the heavy cobra hood like covering on its back end continuously kept throwing off the aim. It worked great as a counterweight for a melee weapon, but it was horrible on a ranged one.

Naruto basically considered it to be a semi-automatic flintlocke rifle that just happened to shoot plasma bolts, except harder to aim.

The zat'nik'tel sidearm was at least more compact, even if it was still shaped like a coiled serpent for some retarded reason. True, it couldn't kill with a single shot, but it would still incapacitate and it was much easier to use.

"I welcome you to my planet lord Uzu, and hope that trade between us may be profitable." Banaded said after two of his Jaffa had led the horned man into the room and took guard positions in the corners and he'd gotten over the shock of his guest's appearance.

"I am certain that it will be." Naruto replied, easily faking the Goa'uld-ish tone of voice and using a minor Genjutsu to make the Goa'uld think that he was sensing the presence of naquadah that all Goa'uld had in their bloodstream from him.

He also had to prevent his eye from twitching at the ridiculous preponderance of the color gold in the room. Gold plastered walls, gold colored curtains, gold embroidered coushins. Seriously.

Even the Goa'uld himself was wrapped up in a lot of gold, his host being a man of Egyptian descent with braided black hair, dressed as a high priest of old and heavily decorated with, you guessed it, gold!

Banaded fought down the nervous crawling sensation in his host's stomach at the rolling thunder of Uzu's voice, the natural growl in it further deepened by the Goa'uld tone. He _definitely_ needed to get ahold of a few such hosts.

"I must say that yours is a most impressive host." Banaded commented, hoping to learn where more like it could be found.

"My Queen thinks so too." Naruto agreed vaguely. His body was a host for his soul if you wanted to be technical and Xanna did find it impressive.

While Banaded was surprised that Uzu already had a Queen, it was not that big of a surprise. It was nigh impossible for a Goa'uld to establish himself as a great power without a Queen to spawn new larva for his Jaffa. The comparative rarity of Queens simply meant that most of them were either in the service or thrall of the System Lords and the stronger independent Goa'uld that managed to stay independent.

"How did you come by it?" Banaded tried to draw information from his guest once more.

"With great difficulty." Naruto answered with a smirk, being deliberately vague and knowing that he needed to delay for a while longer if he wanted to avoid being forced into steamrolling the opposition all by himself. Again. Xanna wanted him to treat this like an RTS strategy game(one that he wasn't allowed to cheat at), which meant that he couldn't just point and click and delete.

A rather callous approach to the lives of their subjects, but nobody had ever accused Xanna of being particularly humanitarian.

"Perhaps you would like to see my most recent batch of trained slaves?" Banaded redirected, seeing that his guest wasn't about to let slip anything. Disappointing, but not surprising.

"That's why I'm here." Naruto said, speaking truthfully but only marginally so.

The following half an hour or so was an exhibition of attractive young men and women of various skin tones ranging from very dark to light olive, dressed in skimpy outfits and oiled to make their skin gleam in the torchlight.

Naruto listened with an expressionless face as the Goa'uld made his sales pitch, extolling about how these people had gone through years of training to serve whichever master chose them in the skills they were trained in and how they were kept in peak physical form in case any Goa'uld wanted them as a host for one of their underlings or even themselves.

He was oddly reminded of a greasy car salesman as he added that they were even suitable for use as Lo'taurs, personal servants of Goa'uld whose primary role was to serve as an emergency host if their current one was to be fatally injured somehow.

"That's quite enough, I'll take them." Naruto interrupted when he saw that the slimy worm was about to offer that he 'sample' one of the women, a very pretty girl with a dark tan skin tone that had obviously been trained as a pleasure slave exclusively.

She was terrified of him but doing her best not to show it, knowing that a punishment would follow if she did so. Naruto could practically feel his soft spot for cute girls kicking in, even though he knew that it was likely just his appearance that unsettled her rather than the prospect of having to sleep with him. Having been trained for a young age for that exact purpose likely meant that she'd come to see it as her purpose in life, but his little sister complex didn't care about technicalities.

The situation with the Jaffa had most likely had enough time to settle down at any rate.

"Which ones?" Banaded asked, a bit nonplussed at the interruption but nonetheless pleased.

"All of them."

"That will be very expensive." Banaded cautioned but his voice was full of greed. "If you take them all, then I won't be able to accomodate any of my other buyers."

"That won't be a problem." Naruto assured him.

"I beg to differ, even the amount of naquadah you brought with you would not cover the expense of such a thing, but perhaps if you could provide a few examples of your host's species, we could make a trade." Banaded bargained, getting to what he really wanted. The amount of naquadah that Uzu had brought with him would have actually been sufficient, but the chance at a new host species was not to be wasted.

"We seem to have a misunderstanding." Naruto said mildly. "When I said that I'll take them all, I mean that I will be taking all of these, your own personal servants and attendants, all of your Jaffa, the entire human population of this planet, all of your food stores, all the tools, furniture, building materials, technology and any other resources you might have that isn't nailed down."

That was a lie actually. If it was nailed down, he'd just rip it up, but a man had to finish his sentences somehow.

The two Jaffa standing guard in the room reacted even as their shocked lord simply stared at the horned man, brandishing their staff weapons at the sudden threat.

Naruto reacted faster though, kicking a low table at the more distant one with enough force to knock him out and grabbing the bulbous tip of the staff of the closest one before it could even be primed, squeezing so hard that it crumpled under his strength, destroying the firing mechanism completely. A moment later, the shocked Jaffa's head crashed into the wall and he joined his comrade in unconsciousness.

The slaves still in the room shrieked and ducked for cover at the sudden violence, while Naruto advanced towards the backpedaling and terrified Goa'uld.

"You had your own warriors so busy watching my Jaffa that you didn't consider that _I_ might be the real threat, now I'm going to kill you and take command of them without opposition." He growled menacingly, deliberately peeling his lips away from his teeth to show the strings of saliva dripping from their points.

Score one for the Alien movie series. Those Xenomorphs sure knew how to make scary faces.

"Thanks for that by the way, that many warriors would have been able to overpower me." Naruto continued, lying outright.

Banaded retreated rapidly, eyes wide with terror at his mistake. He hadn't expected that anyone would attack him here. Visiting Goa'uld were required to relinquish their kara kesh devices, which Uzu had done and they had sat far enough apart in the meeting room that it wouldn't be possible to use any hidden knives. Certainly, no Goa'uld could realistically hope to overcome two armed Jaffa and himself, who still had his kara kesh, so he had diverted his warriors to the sixty Jaffa retinue that Uzu had brought with him instead, thinking it the greater possible threat.

On that note, he tried to compose himself and fire a blast from his kara kesh to keep the dangerous horned man away. The blast wave was not as strong as it could have been thanks to his frazzled emotional state, but it hardly mattered as Uzu raised his own empty palm towards him.

"Shinra Tensei(Heavenly Subjugation of the Omnipresent God)!"

Banaded felt himself hit with an irresistibly powerful shockwave, stronger than anything he'd ever felt, and crashed painfully through the doors and then against the wall of the connecting corridor in his palace.

"I haven't practiced that one much, so I couldn't make it any weaker. So sorry." Naruto mocked sarcastically and continued to slowly advance.

Without another thought in his head save for needing to find his Jaffa to protect him, Banaded ran towards the closest ring transporters that would take him to safety. Inside his shaken thoughts, he numbly realised that this new host that Uzu was using must be some kind of Hok'taur, the superior host that so many Goa'uld spent their time searching for.

Chancing a glance backwards during his panicked flight, he became further panicked as he saw his horned pursuer somehow easily keeping pace with him despite the fact that he appeared to be walking while Banaded was running. He was also dragging his claws along the walls and effortlessly gouging the stone with them.

Finally, he reached the ring transporters and initiated them, gulping down terrified breaths as Uzu just barely missed him.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Naruto smirked as he walked out of the palace through the front door, palming the Long Range Visual Communications Device that Zeus had kept in his private quarters. The spherical device(once again an ugly golden color) was used as a form of faster-than-light communication from what he could tell, though it seemed a cumbersome way of doing it. Definitely needed a shorter name too.

As expected it activated, showing the face of Te'lok, who had its partner.

"It is happening as you said it would my lord, Banaded's Jaffa are converging on your position and abandoning their observation of us. We have subdued the ones that remained and are preparing to execute our objective."

"Casualties?"

"One of ours and two of theirs are dead, the rest are merely unconscoiouss." The Jaffa reported. The superior training that Naruto had put them through had allowed his warriors to easily overcome to complacent Jaffa of Banaded, who hadn't seen or expected to see combat in years. Thanks to the use of the zat guns, the casualties were low on the enemy side as well as theirs.

"We'll bring their bodies with us and put them into the sarcophagus as soon as possible." Naruto decided. No need to leave them dead if there was a technological excuse readily available for any mysterious resurrections.

"Very well my lord, " Te'lok agreed and continued. "We are moving to secure the town square."

"You've already assembled the holographic projector?" Naruto asked in surprise. "And didn't we say that the stairs of Ra's temple would be a better location?"

He and Xanna didn't actually have enough naquadah to fill all the crates he'd brought with him, but generous use of false bottoms made it look like they did, _and_ it provided a convenient hiding spot for extra weaponry and the pieces of the aforementioned holographic projector.

"We have since discovered that there is a much larger projector in the town square that Banaded uses for spreading propaganda, it would be ideal for our purposes." The Jaffa said confidently.

"Niiiice." Naruto drawled with a grin. "Go for it then, but only if you don't encounter too much opposition."

It made sense, he mused, for Banana Dead to use one of those. A giant holographic avatar would look pretty godlike to your average uneducated peasant. Zeus would probably have been a lot more successful if he'd bothered to use that instead of summary executions.

"Understood."

Naruto then noticed several Udajeet death gliders taking off, clearly intending to attack him. "I gotta go. Stuff to do, people to kill. I'll keep the heat off your back."

The orb turned opaque and Naruto put it away, making it vanish back into the Interdimensional Storage Locker.

"Come at me little birdies." He muttered to himself as the modest flight of three death gliders approached swiftly, firing pointlessly on the ground in a show of attempted intimidation.

Those things were pretty useless at anything else anyway, their design making them unsuitable for actual combat, since their weapons weren't really powerful enough to even dent the shields of a Ha'tak mothership unless they came at it in massive numbers. Not to mention how hard it was to aim at anything when all you had were two forward facing plasma cannons and had to rely on line of sight alone for aim.

When they were close enough, Naruto took a running leap and launched himself at the nearest one, landing on the wing, much to the wide eyed shock of the two Jaffa in the cockpit, his long hair whipping around wildly due to the speed they were moving at.

He gave them a grin and swung himself under the wing to rip off one of the plasma cannons and then climbed back on.

While the pilot tried desperately (and uselessly) to shake him off, Naruto used his stolen plasma cannon, which was really just an extra large Ma'tok staff, and started firing at the other two gliders.

He managed to blast one of them in the wing fairly easily before his ride started jinking madly to throw off his aim and keep him from hitting the other one. Irritably, he stomped his foot on the wing and damaged it enough that the glider couldn't stay in the air any more.

Since his ride was going down, Naruto leapfrogged to the last glider and raked his claws through its underbelly, severing the power lines that supplied electricity to the ugly crafts computer and allowed it to be flown.

This glider also rapidly started going down, its pilot unable to control it any longer. Its two passengers may or may not survive, Naruto didn't much care which. More than likely they'd end up getting resurrected with a sarcophagus soon either way, but he wouldn't be heartbroken if they died permanently either.

He landed on the city outskirts and could already hear the tread of many Jaffa feet as they converged on him, no doubt on Banaded's panicked orders.

Good, if they were busy hunting him, then Te'lok and his posse would be unmolested.

Naruto paused for a moment and spoke to himself. "That sounded wrong even in my head."

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Banaded was not having a good day, not at all.

Over the years, Ra had steadily decreased the garrison of Saral, all the while praising Banaded for his skillful administration of the planet. At the time he had taken pride in this, seeing it as proof of his skill that he did not need a large garrison to keep control of the humans so that Ra could use those forces elsewhere.

He'd never been concerned over the reductions, as even the mere three death gliders he had been left with were more than enough to keep a few thousand humans cowed if it came to that. Not that it really did, due to his effective governance that kept the malcontents controlled mostly by their own people who knew that things could be a lot worse and didn't want to rock the boat and outside threats had never been an issue due to how deep in Ra's territory Saral was.

Seeing Uzu tear the three gliders apart with his bare hands had him changing his mind though. He'd never imagine that a Hok'taur host would be so monstrously powerful. If this trend continued, this newcomer would rapidly rise to the rank of System Lord as he subsumed other minor Goa'uld that wouldn't be able to stand against a concerted ground assault led by such a monster.

And there was another oddity, that he led from the front, even operating without a constant Jaffa guard. That was something that only a rare few Goa'uld did, the most prominent example being Heru'ur, though even the feared, aggressive general and son of Ra didn't do it to this extent.

Even now, Uzu was leading his Jaffa on a merry chase through the outskirts of the city and the outlying forest. The Jaffa were nowhere near quick enough to catch the ludicrously fast horned man.

Banaded had ensconced himself in his private ship, a basic Tel'tak cargo ship. It had neither weapons or shields, but it did have an efficient hyperdrive engine and more importantly, a cloaking device. It was currently hovering invisibly in the air above the city.

He had been monitoring the life signs through his ship's sensors and getting an approximate idea of the situation that way. It was no good for use in the city due to the number of humans in it, but the chase was happening on the outskirts.

Thus he saw a single life sign moving at such a pace as to boggle the mind, almost literally running circles around the others chasing it. He had no illusions as to who that life sign belonged to.

The activation of the Long Range Visual Communications Device surprised him and almost made him let out a startled yelp, but he managed to suppress it as the image of his First Prime appeared, his only Jaffa to have been taught the secret of how to operate it.

"My lord, we cannot defeat this enemy god, he moves too quickly and I believe that he is merely delaying us to allow his own Jaffa to complete their task." The man with a golden ram symbol on his forehead reported, his breathing slightly labored from his attempts at catching the speedy horned man.

"What task? What are his Jaffa doing?" Banaded asked urgently, face paling as he considered the fact that there might be yet _another_ problem.

"I do not know my lord, they have taken the town square and entrenched themselves. We have attempted to retake it, but the enemy god harrasses us whenever we try to break off our pursuit of him."

Banaded felt like pulling his hair out, or his host's hair at any rate. This was exactly the kind of complicated situation that had led to the doom of his attempts at establishing himself as a galactic power. A multi pronged attack that he didn't know how to repel. He'd contented himself with increasing his personal power from within the safety of the Supreme System Lord's empire exactly because he didn't handle these kinds of things too well.

He could instantly deduce what their target was in the town square and knew that they could use the huge holographic projector there to spread all sorts of information to the human population. Pretty soon, he might have an all out rebellion on his hands and without the airborne death gliders, his paltry force of Jaffa might not be able to repel it.

Uzu's words that he would take the entire human population of the planet suddenly made sense. He didn't mean to remove him and place himself as their new master, he intended to play the part of their liberator and use the holographic projector to claim divinity all in one swoop.

A portion of the humans would likely resist him, but most of them probably wouldn't, he might even get a few of Banaded's own Jaffa to convert, further cementing his victory.

Banaded felt a trickle of sweat bead on his forehead as he contemplated simply escaping and abandoning his Jaffa to whatever fate awaited them. Ra would be highly displeased with him for the loss of Saral, but news of a Goa'uld with a Hok'taur host would most likely mitigate that.

He'd stayed so far only because he'd hoped to capture the invader, but that was looking more and more unlikely. If he could have done so, then he would actually have profited from this entire debacle and Ra would have rewarded him greatly, but paranoia was now niggling at his mind, a deep fear that Uzu would find him despite the cloaking of his Tel'tak.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Te'lok nodded to himself in satisfaction as one of his fellow Jaffa carefully set the frequency on the Long Range Visual Communications Device imbeded in the holographic projector to receive from the one that Naruto was using so that he would be able to broadcast a hologram from it.

Te'lok had seen this device in use before and had always thought it a display of the powers of his god to be able to manifest an avatar to speak from a distance.

Then Naruto had explained that it was a tool just like a hammer, save for being more complex. He freely admitted that he didn't know exactly how it worked himself, but he knew the basic principle of it and was able to figure out its operation quickly enough.

Te'lok and the other members of this attack on Saral had been required to learn how to operate it as well, which had allowed them to apropriate Banaded's main tool of propaganda for themselves.

Once more taking out the palm sized golden communications sphere, Te'lok activated it and informed Naruto that their task was complete.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Banaded's nerve had just about broken as he saw the life signs of his Jaffa becoming ever more disorganized.

He had no idea how Uzu intended to proceed once he took control of Saral, but that hardly mattered now. Patrols by Ra's ships were rare this deep in his territory and he had no means of contacting them, since the only Long Range Visual Communications Device powerful enough to call for aid was in the palace, which he'd been forced to flee.

The Supreme System Lord would be immensely displeased by the loss, but Banaded doubted that his punishment would be too harsh. For one thing, at least he would be bringing back information on this new Goa'uld and the powerful host he was using and for another, Ra was not in the habit of handing out punishments without consideration of the circumstances.

The defenses around Saral were extremely light as nobody had expected it to be attacked and even then, who could have predicted a Hok'taur host?

With resignation, Banaded pulled on the control sphere and directed the Tel'tak upwards, away from the planet that had been his for centuries now.

"Oh no you don't." A familiar voice chuckled from the seat next to him, this time without the distinctly Goa'uld tone.

Banaded nearly jumped out of his seat in fright as his hands were slapped away from the control sphere that was used to fly the cloaked cargo ship. Turning his head to the interloper, he beheld none other than the one who had attacked him.

"How did you get in here?!" He shrieked in a tone most unbeffiting of a god.

"Fuck you, that's how."

The Goa'uld blinked in confusion and worked his jaw uselessly, unable to make sense of that no matter how hard he tried. It didn't help that in Goa'uld, that translated to something along the lines of 'copulate with you, that's how'

"You desire to mate with me?" Banaded asked incredulously and more than a little aprehensively. He'd heard...stories of what some Goa'uld did with their defeated rivals.

"What?!" Naruto gaped a his passenger/prisoner/co-pilot. "NO! What the fuck man?!"

Before Banaded could offer any kind of reply, Naruto continued in an aggrieved and downright enraged tone. "You know what, fuck you and fuck your stupid ass language! I can't even insult someone properly using this piece of shit."

Banaded cowered before the irate tirade and furious glare of the horned man, wisely keeping his mouth shut about the many, many things that didn't make sense to him about that sentence.

As it happened, he wouldn't have had time to make any comment anyway, because something of much more immediate importance grabbed his attention.

"Cliff!"

"What?"

"CLIFF!" He repeated much more loudly, pointing frantically out the view screen, where a cliff face was approaching rapidly.

"Oh, that cliff." Naruto replied with far too little concern for the Goa'uld's taste and managed to pull up before they crashed. "I've never actually flown one of these before."

Banaded made no comment, busy as he was trying to calm his own frantic heartbeat, as well as that of his host. As he was doing this, he became aware of the fact that he wasn't sensing any naquadah from the man next to him. Combined with the lack of Goa'uld voice that Uzu had been demonstrating ever since his appearance in the Tel'tak, he could come to only one conclusion.

"You are not Goa'uld." He whispered in shock.

"You're only figuring this out _now_?" Naruto asked back, his tone implying that Banaded was immensely stupid. "And don't even think of trying to jump hosts, Zeus already tried that one and now he's dead."

Banaded sank back into his seat, stunned, not only at the revelation that the renegade Goa'uld Zeus had been killed but at the implications.

If he was not Goa'uld, what was he then? A member of some advanced race that had decided to launch a campaign of conquest against the Goa'uld and take their place? An opportunist that had seen a weakness in Saral's defenses and decided to exploit it for his own gain? A man that had some grudge against the Goa'uld and was hunting them? So many questions and no answers were forthcoming.

"What are you doing?" Banaded asked, speaking far more meekly than he had in centuries. In fact, the last time he had spoken like this was when he'd begged Ra for protection from the enemies he'd made. Just like any other Goa'uld, he hated being anything else than the most powerful person in the room, but he was in arms reach of a man whose claws he'd seen mangle stone and metal, so certain concessions had to be made.

"I'm setting up this thing so that it has a good angle on us." Naruto answered distractedly as he placed the golden communications device on the spaceship version of a dashboard that the cargo ship was sporting.

"A good angle for what?"

"For projecting both of us to that big holographic projector you've set up in the town square. It's almost like an advanced version of a home video, which I would normaly have posted on Youtube and then gotten into a lengthy and pointless, but highly amusing, argument over the legitimacy of said video." Naruto explained, his expression subtly darkening as he continued speaking.

Banaded had at this point decided that the wisest course of action would be to submit to the power of this horned newcomer, whether he was Goa'uld or not, and offer to serve him. He didn't see himself surviving for very long if he stayed loyal to Ra. He'd nearly mustered the courage to ask for a bit of clarification on the confusing explanation when the point became moot as Naruto suddenly exploded into another angry rant.

"Only, I can't do that, because you backwards assholes don't have anything like the internet! WHAT KIND OF SPACE FARING CIVILIZATION DOESN'T HAVE ANY FUCKING INTERNET?! CAN YOU ANSWER THAT ONE YOU SHIT EATING GOAT FUCKER?!" The horned man roared at ear splitting volume down at the Goa'uld, gesticulating wildly with his arms and completely ignoring the fact that the Tel'tak was losing altitude.

Banaded cringed as far back into his seat as he could as the horned man loomed over him and continued shouting, making himself as small as possible as if it would help him evade the misdirected wrath of the internet deprived deity. He understood less than half of what was being said, as Naruto had started slipping into a variety of languages whenever he felt that he could conjugate profanity with greater clarity in that particular one. He paid particular attention to German, because it really didn't take a lot to make that language sound angry.

Banaded wished with all his heart that he could somehow reach the transporter rings and use them to escape from this unstable monstrosity. His desire to avoid these kinds of things were exactly why he'd been content to remain a minor Goa'uld for all this time.

Well, not _exactly_ these kinds of things, but hardship in general.

Eventually, Naruto finished venting and sat back down with an annoyed snort, deliberately clipping a tree and then activating the communications orb to start broadcasting the image of himself and Banaded in holographic form in the town square.

Banaded had just finished flinching as the Tel'tak hit a tree and was looking more than slightly frazzled. He wasn't sure if it was safe to move yet, or if it would set off the volatile horned man again, so he remained frozen in his seat in a cringing postition.

"Will you stop cowering already and give a wave to the people, everyone is watching you know." Naruto stated in a very matter-of-fact tone, the previous towering rage completely gone from his voice.

Banaded started a bit at being addressed before his eyes widened at the realisation that anyone who cared to look could see the undignified position he was in. He quickly tidied himself up as best as he could manage and adjusted his posture to something more fitting of a god.

"Greetings people of Saral! My name is Naruto and I'm sure you recognize the person next to me as Banana Dead, even if he _does_ look like he's been crying recently for some reason that I can't possibly imagine." Naruto started theatrically.

Having been thorougly cowed earlier, Banaded didn't dare contradict anything that the horned man said, not even his mispronounced name nor did he bother wondering why he'd introduced himself as Naruto. He also noted that the Tel'tak had ascended into orbit and now hung there.

That made him feel uneasy for some reason.

"It has come to my attention that in all the time that he has ruled this planet, Banana Leg has never once had the opportunity to demonstrate exactly how much of a god he was." Naruto continued. "Being a god myself, I could not let this stand! Today, once and for all I intend to silence all those who doubt the divinity of Banana Head!"

Naruto paused to build dramatic tension before he once more continued to speak. "I will do this by crashing this ship into the planet at the highest possible speed, after which we will both walk out of the wreckage completely unharmed in true divine fashion."

Immediately after the sentence was completed, Naruto angled the Te'ltac into a nosedive, aiming at a rocky patch of ground on the outskirts of the city.

"What are you doing?" Banaded asked in alarm, seeing the terrifying grin on the horned man's face as the ground approached.

"I already told you what I'm going to do."

"You will kill us both!"

"Don't be ridiculous, we'll be fine. We're gods aren't we?"

"I beg you my lord, do not do this!" Banaded pleaded, throwing all pride to the wind in the face of his need to survive.

"Why not?" Naruto asked in a puzzled tone. "Haven't you ever done something crazy just because you're a god and you can?"

"We are not gods! That was just a lie to keep the Jaffa and the slaves docile!" The Goa'uld said frantically, seeing that they were fast approaching the point of no return, where it would be impossible to pull out of their descent in time.

"Oh." Naruto said in the same tone that someone might use if they had, after years of misuse, discovered that the toothbrush was actually meant for the brushing of teeth and not for scrubbing the toilet. "In that case, this is going to end badly for you."

His nerve breaking, Banaded tried to wrest the control sphere out of Naruto's hands, only to be easily pushed back into his chair.

Seeing his death approach with no way to stop it, Banaded let out a wordless yell of fear. "AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH."

Unable to let the opportunity go, Naruto waved his hands in the air madly and echoed him, though his own voice was sarcastically high pitched. "AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH."

Just before they hit the ground, Naruto was struck by another idea and he implemented it instantly without so much as a second thought.

"ALLAHU AKBAR!"

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

A large crowd of gawkers stared at the twisted wreckage of the Tel'tak, both human and Jaffa. After seeing Banaded admit that he was not a god in a fit of terror, none of them were quite sure what to think.

Naruto's Jaffa also stared at the wreckage, worried for their lord in spite of themselves. They'd seen him survive some pretty crazy things, but this was way beyond that.

"What will we do now?" Banaded's First Prime asked as he approached Te'lok, sounding a bit lost. "If they are both dead, then we have no one to serve. Are we to wait for Ra to arrive?"

They were interrupted by a shriek of tortured metal before any answer could be given. Looking back at the remains of the Tel'tak, they beheld a chuckling Naruto walk out of it without so much as a scratch on him.

"That was fun."

Banaded's Jaffa immediately fell to their knees, causing Naruto to sigh even as the Goa'uld's former First Prime spoke. "What is your wish my lord?"

The large crowd of humans behind them instantly follow their example, in response to which the horned man pinched the bridge of his nose. All this kneeling had gotten old _really_ fast, but he couldn't deal with it right now. They were on a schedule.

With this in mind, he jumped on top of a building and spoke in a booming voice that easily carried halfway across the settlement.

"We're evacuating this planet, spread the word to everyone that they are to take as many supplies as they can and bring them to the stargate. Don't bother with shiny trinkets, focus on bringing food, clothing, tools and other basics. Take as much as you can carry and feel free to loot the palace while you're at it." He ordered. He wasn't going to be giving them a choice in the matter, because he sincerely doubted that the humans on Saral could be trusted to make an informed decision after centuries, millenia even, of brainwashing. "And no fighting! I want this looting to be done in a calm and orderly manner."

Everyone scrambled to obey and soon word spread like wildfire that their new god had commanded that Saral was to be abandoned.

A few minutes later, Te'lok approached Naruto with a question. "My lord, why did you shout 'Allahu Akbar' before crashing? Is it some kind of spell?"

Naruto's shoulders slumped in disappointment. Before Te'lok had asked this, he'd been able to pretend, but now...

"Let me ask you something else instead of answering that one Te'lok." He sighed out.

"Yes my lord?"

"If a man says and does something _really_ offensive, but nobody is around to be offended by it...is it still funny?"

"Uhh..." Te'lok pontificated and attempted to decipher the philosophical question. "If something is offensive...or amusing...then would it not be so regardless of whether anyone hears it or not?"

Naruto brightened slightly and clapped the Jaffa on the shoulder. "Thanks Te'lok, you're a good man."

He didn't feel like counter arguing that both offense and amusement were entirely subjective and therefore it _did_ matter if anyone heard it or not, as well as _who_ heard it. He wanted to believe that someone, somewhere, some_when_ was offended...so that he could laugh at them.

"Thank you my lord." A somewhat confused but nonetheless proud Te'lok replied.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

A few hours later, Naruto was doing what he could to organize the exodus he'd started. There was a constant stream of people bringing stuff to the as of yet inactive stargate and it was starting to get rather chaotic. People naturally wanted to keep hold of their own things, but there was only so much room.

Already, most of the immediate area around the gate had become cluttered with sacks, crates, carts and other forms of containers that were full of the things he'd ordered people to bring along. There was even a sack made out of one of the golden curtains from the palace. Naruto was impressed with whoever had thought of that one.

Inevitably, there were a few people who didn't listen and brought along useless junk such as golden chalices, candlesticks and other such things that Naruto collectively called 'booty'.

The pirate kind, not the ass kind.

And by ass he meant the euphemism for the human rear end, not a donkey.

Either way, if this kept up he was going to need to open the gate and start letting people through, or else things might start going bad. There had already been a few arguments as people were starting to become crowded.

It was not all bad though. Over a hundred children and teenagers had been found in the now deceased Banaded's expansive palace, clearly having been taken to be trained as slaves for one reason or another. They were now getting reacquainted with their families, though it was clearly a somewhat stilted affair in the case of those who had already gone through many years of training. Still, it was a very sugary sight.

"My lord, we have a problem."

Naruto sighed and responded in a tone of resignation. "Of course we do. What is it?"

"You said that Saral was chosen as a target because it had a population small enough that we could take them all and support them with what little infrastructure Erius had."

"Yes, and?"

"Zeus' databanks seem to have been incorrect or out of date my lord. According to Banaded's former First Prime, the full population of Saral is nearly ten thousand instead of five."

Naruto grimaced. He'd thought that the amount of human life he was sensing was a bit high, but there was nothing else for it now. He wasn't going to just tell half of these people that they couldn't come along.

"My wife is going to be so piiiissed~." He sing-songed to himself.

Telok's lips twitched in humour, being well aware of the limitation that Xanna had given as to the number of humans that Naruto was free to take and why she'd given it.

"Perhaps not my lord, there is a large amount of grain and other foodstuff being held in storage, either for the people here or for some other Goa'uld. Enough that feeding so many should be possible for at least a short while. Unfortunately, it is being held in crates so large that we have no means of moving them without a cargo ship...which you destroyed, but the food itself _is_ there."

"Don't worry about that, I'll move them." Naruto grinned.

"There is _one_ other problem my lord." Te'lok said hesitantly. He hadn't been able to deal with this particular problem on his own without bloodshed and he wasn't sure how Naruto would handle it.

He'd already snapped the neck of one particularly mouthy Jaffa priestess who had been asserting that the now freed slaves belonged to Ra and that Naruto had no right to take them. She'd been causing problems and delays despite the rather convincing demonstration Naruto had put on about how Goa'uld weren't gods and the horned man had clearly lost patience with her. Te'lok had no wish to see any more of his people killed for their delusions to bring the others in line, but he couldn't blame Naruto for it either...they didn't have time to do things the slow way.

"Another one?" The horned man asked with a raised eyebrow.

"While the priesthood of Banaded has submitted to your will with little issue, those of Ra stationed on this planet are proving a good deal more stubborn. They have barricaded themselves in the Temple of Ra, along with a few dozen people who still believe in the divinity of the Goa'uld, and refuse to come out. They claim that they will wait for Ra's arrival so that he can 'liberate' them from your oppression." Te'lok explained.

Naruto rubbed his chin thoughtfully and considered how to solve this issue.

"Gather a few dozen warriors and raid the temple. Subdue them by force if you have to and drag them to the gate, we don't have time to talk them out of being stupid. After you've done that, I want you to make them watch as you rob the temple blind and set it on fire. "Naruto ordered after a moment of consideration. "And remember to pillage _before_ you burn."

"But my lord, there is nothing of use in the temple, only trinkets and religious paraphelia, perhaps a few robes. Did you not say to leave such things behind?" Te'lok asked in confusion.

"It's not about the stuff Te'lok, it's about sending a message." The horned man said with a grin, getting the idea to send Ra a message or two of his own.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Naruto nodded to himself approvingly as he saw that things were as ready as they were likely to get. Soon, it would be time to open the stargate and start sending people through. He would open the gate and keep supplying power to it to make sure it could stay open for as long as needed, instead of the usual thirty eight minute limitation. He'd have to try and figure out what that was about one of these days.

They'd be aprehensive of walking into the shimmering blue portal no doubt, but they'd get over it. They had gotten over their incredulity of seeing him carry a multi ton crate of food to the gate all by himself too.

"My lord." Te'lok began nervously.

"Don't tell me we've got _another_ problem?" Naruto groaned. The Temple of Ra had just barely started burning properly and he didn't think that he could just keep setting things on fire as a solution.

"No my lord, but you are standing in a pile of animal excrement."

Naruto looked down and saw that he was indeed standing in such a pile. "Ah, the dangers of going barefoot to a planet with lots of livestock." He said musingly and extracted his foot, preparing to use a surreptious control of water to clean the soiled appendage. "There's so much shit around I didn't even notice the smell."

Right at that moment, one of Banaded's Jaffa shoved a man, causing him to stumble and fall on his children, who cried out at the sudden and surprising turn of events.

The few Jaffa that Naruto had brought along winced in sympathy for their fellow Jaffa, knowing exactly what type of punishment was going to be heaped upon him.

Instead of cleaning his foot, he swung it forcefully, making the shit on it splatter over the offending Jaffa's back, with a small amount landing on the back of his head.

The man spun around with a glare, seeking whoever had dared assault him and paled when he saw the horned form of his new god beckoning him to approach.

"What is your name?" Naruto asked mildly once the man was standing in front of him.

"B'rick my lord." He answered with as much composture as he could manage.

"Your name is Brick, seriously?" Naruto couldn't stop himself from asking incredulously, but waved off any answer. "Nevermind, it's not important. Why did you feel the need to push that man? Especially when I gave specific instructions that you are not to harass anyone?"

"He was moving too slowly my lord." B'rick tried to justify.

"I see, well you seem to be behaving most unyouthfully, so in order to fan your flames of youth you are going to apologize to him and then run circles around the palace." Naruto decided. "Te'lok, have one of the others explain things to him, I've got another job for you."

Te'lok nodded and waved the closest warrior over and sent him to explain to B'rick what he was to do.

A few minutes later, one of Banaded's former Jaffa leaned over and asked what the 'flames of youth' were and how running circles around the palace was going to help fan them.

"We don't know. " The man, a young Jaffa that had only become an adult scant months before the horned duo had killed zeus and taken over, shrugged. "Lord Naruto frequently uses this type of punishment when he is displeased with us. He will speak of these 'flames of youth' and tell us to run until we are told to stop. Not even Te'lok understands what it is supposed to mean, but we all do it."

"What if you were to refuse?" The same Jaffa asked curiously.

"It was only attempted once." The young Jaffa shuddered. "Lord Naruto forced him to wear an extremely tight fitting, bright green suit and made him run through the streets, all the while encouraging the women to make lewd comments. B'rick should consider himself fortunate that he did not need to endure such humiliation."

The listeners nodded empathically. Indeed, they could not imagine how they would live with themselves if their pride was so mauled.

Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

_Meanwhile, with Te'lok and Naruto._

"You'll be going through first Te'lok, along with the one dead Jaffa that we haven't been able to bring back with Banaded's sarcophagus. Tell my wife the situation and that she's going to have more work than expected getting everything organized." Naruto said.

Te'lok shifted uncomfortably as he spoke. "Do I have to my lord?"

"Don't worry, she's not in the habit of killing the messenger, and we can bring you back in case she does anyway." Naruto assured him.

Te'lok merely sighed and nodded, prepared to carry out his unenviable order. Xanna scared him.

"And yes Te'lok, I am a bastard."

"I did not say anything." The Jaffa said defensively.

"You were thinking it."

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

**And here we have chapter two. I'm in a big hurry to get to work, so I can't make any poignant requests to review, but it would be much appreciated :P.**


	3. Chapter 3

**Here is another chapter, this time with a slightly-longer-than-planned delay. You should expect the chapters to come a bit slower than they had for my previous fics, mostly due to the higher difficulty of writing a fic in an empire building setting, but also due to my suddenly being slightly less of a no-lifer.**

**Not to worry, no danger of me getting a girlfriend or even wanting one :P. I've merely been playing a lot of co-op games with a friend any my brother.**

**I would like to thank everyone for reviewing and I hope you enjoy this latest chapter.**

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

The stargate on Saral opened with its usual eruption of unstable plasma before settling into the calm, blue event horizon of a controlled wormhole. Through the gate stepped a small troop of Jaffa, led by an old Jaffa Master.

Ra had recently received word from one of his underlings who had come to Saral to make a trade that the planet was emptied with no sign of who had done it and the Supreme System Lord had sent the best tracker among his Jaffa to figure the mystery out.

Master Borok was both honored and grateful for the assignment. Honored for the trust in him it showed and grateful for the chance to stretch his legs a bit. At his age, he wasn't sent into combat anymore and his days were filled with instructing younger Jaffa in the art of tracking. In fact, had he been a less skilled tracker, he would not have been given any more symbiotes to carry. Though it would no longer be an issue very soon, as the last one was having difficulty keeping him going.

He observed with approval as his squad, which were all his current batch of students, took care not to mess up any of the tracks. He'd taken them along on this trip because it would allow them to practice the craft he was teaching them without risk of combat.

_Though they could hardly have done any worse than the buffoon who reported it to lord Ra._ The crotchety old Jaffa thought to himself sourly, seeing that many of the tracks were made only recently, not feeling the slightest bit repentant for his uncharitable thoughts on one of the lesser gods serving Ra.

At the very least it hadn't rained, which would have erased all the tracks here. A small blessing, as the tracks were clearly several days old.

"Master Borok, something extremely heavy was dragged here." The voice of his student snapped him out of his irritable wool gathering.

Borok took a look at the tracks and saw that the much younger Jaffa was indeed correct, though it was not a very hard deduction to make. A wide trench had been gouged in the earth.

"A large cargo crate, fully loaded." Borok said after a moment's consideration on the size and depth of the trench. "More than one in fact."

"But how did they get it through the gate?" One of the others wondered, frowning at the stone stairway that led to the stargate. While it would not have been impossible for several dozen Jaffa to have dragged it there, it would have been extremely difficult since the cargo crates had no convenient handholds or anything that a rope could be tied on, but it was not impossible. Dragging it up the stairs would have been even more difficult, but also not impossible. Doing it without badly damaging the stairs however, _was_ impossible and the short stairway was in very good condition.

"It was lifted." Borok said, though a faint hint of incredulity could be heard in his tone.

"Impossible, even if Jaffa were to grab hold of every available surface, a fully loaded cargo crate of that size would be too heavy." The same young Jaffa protested.

"It was done by a single man." Borok replied quietly, staring at the ground in front of him while his students erupted into denials.

"Silence fools!" He shouted at them once he lost patience with their behavior. Teaching these idiot younglings to come to the correct conclusions while being wary of deception was always the hardest(and most frustrating) part of instructing them in the fine art of tracking. "Look for yourselves."

The younger Jaffa approached and looked wide eyed at the single set of deeply indented footprints. The set closest to where the crate had been stopped was spaced wider, clearly indicating that the man had braced himself before lifting the crate. There were a few more before the stairway had been reached, but aside from how deeply into the earth they were pressed, they did not show the staggered gait that one might expect from a person carrying an extremely heavy burden.

Aside from incredulity at the idea that a single man could possibly be that strong, the footprints themselves puzzled them also. They were large, clearly belonging to a big man and they were barefoot. Borok could not think of anyone that walked with their feet uncovered like this. The Jaffa usually wore their armored boots if they were not at home, the slaves wore sandals or some other self made footwear, depending on planetary conditions and the gods wore a variety of foot coverings.

"Let us move on, we may discover more elsewhere." The aged Jaffa Master commanded and moved off.

The long since burnt out Temple of Ra was nearby and it didn't take them long to reach it.

Borok ignored the muttering of his students as he looked around, noting the empty containers that looked as if they had once held oil. That would explain how they had started the fire but it was not particularly useful.

They found the bare footprints here once more, though much lighter, as well as Jaffa footprints applenty and it looked as if they had forcibly dragged several people away from the temple, most likely the priesthood. This pointed to it being the action of a rival Goa'uld, but Borok could once again think of none that would do this. The barefooted tracks would in that case most likely belong to the god that these Jaffa served, as only a god could be so strong, but no god would lower himself to performing manual labor.

It was also baffling that the priesthood had been taken alive instead of killed.

"Master, what do you make of this?" The puzzled voice of his student once again snapped Borok out of his contemplation, causing him a small amount of irritation. Borok didn't like having his thoughts interrupted.

Grumbling, he made his way over and was himself puzzled at what his student had found. There were three golden chalices that were normally used in religious ceremonies, clearly taken from the temple before it had been burned.

The first contained the rotting body of a dead Goa'uld, perhaps Banaded himself or some other mature symbiote taken from the pouch of a Jaffa. The second was filled with what Borok identified as stale animal excrement. And most baffling of all, the third contained a stone tablet with a crude, but recognizable carving of male genitalia belonging to either a human or Jaffa.

He had to give his irritating students a glare to shut them up again when they started muttering about how blasphemous it was. Yes, it was blasphemous, but whining about it wasn't going to make it any less so.

"Master, what does it mean?" The only Jaffa to have kept silent at the sight asked.

Borok frowned deeply as he considered the question, but could make no sense of it.

Naruto _had_ intended the first to imply that the Goa'uld would rot just the same as any dead man. The second one was supposed to be a metaphorical representation of how full of shit the Goa'uld religion was and the third one was there simply because Naruto was a dick and knew it.

Of course, all this metaphor was completely lost on the Jaffa, whose culture was so far removed from that of 20th century Earth that they couldn't even begin to make sense of it. Naruto had known this when he'd left the three chalices there, but he hadn't cared much. Because he was a dick.

Giving up on solving the apparent riddle and deciding to pass it on to Ra, they moved on. The temple was close to the city outskirts and they had been able to see the wreckage of the Tel'tak from there, which was where they headed.

The only thing they found was the mangled, bloated, decaying body of Banaded's host that was giving off a truly spectacular stench and wriggled with insects and other corpse eating creepy crawlies.

Naruto hadn't bothered disposing of the man's body since nobody among the living would care about him and the man himself was dead and in no position to care what happened to his carcass. He'd briefly considered simply removing the Goa'uld and letting the host live, but the poor bastard had long since been become a vegetable over the course of millenia of mental domination.

"I do not know." Borok admitted.

"Could it have been the Asgard?"

Borok frowned again in uncertainty. Jaffa legend wasn't exactly detailed on the enigmatic enemy of the Goa'uld, so he couldn't say for sure.

"Lord Ra will know if it was."

Once more the Jaffa moved on through the eerily empty settlement. Everywhere they could see the signs of a mass exodus. Tracks left by carts and livestock abounded on the hardened dirt roads, with the occasional forgotten item left lying carelessly on the ground. There were signs of battle in some areas, especially the town center, but there was a puzzling lack of bodies, either those of Banaded's Jaffa or that of the invader. Surely _someone_ must have died, yet the victorious invading force had apparently taken the dead as well as the living.

Borok organized his students into several groups to cover more ground , leaving the most capable in charge. It was nearing nightfall by the time they regrouped in front of the palace to report their findings.

"What have you found?" Borok prompted, staring at the leader of the first group.

"The homes of the slaves are mostly empty, everything has been taken that could be easily carried." The much younger Jaffa reported. "We have also found a glider that has been shot down with a staff cannon, its pilot and gunner were not present."

"We found the cannon." The second group leader spoke up. "It had been ripped from its glider with brute force. The metal was bent slightly where it had been squeezed too hard."

The report set off another round of muttering from the others who knew how durable the staves were, severely irritating Borok once again. "You will cease gossiping like old matrons and allow him to finish!"

"We also believe that the cannon was ripped away mid flight, as we found the glider that once carried it nearby. It crashed due to having its wing severely bent by what appears to be a forceful stomp. The size of the indentation in the wing corresponds to the size of the bare footprints we found." The second group leader continued reporting after getting a nod from the Jaffa Master.

"What of the Jaffa who had flown it?" Borok asked, giving a pre-emptive glare to prevent his students from gossiping.

"They were not present."

Borok hummed and rubbed at his chin, considering the situation for a moment before giving a nod to the third group leader as a prompt for him to speak.

"We found the last of the gliders, this ones underbelly had been carved open with what appear to be claws. Given that the glider crashed, it must have also been done during flight. Neither pilot nor gunner were present." The young Jaffa reported.

"What makes you think it was done by claws?" Borok asked.

"We did not truly know until we investigated the signs of a pursuit into the nearby forest. Many jaffa were chasing the barefooted one, to no apparent effect. The distance between each footprint was immense and the stride forceful. The speed with which this creature would have been moving would render pursuit impossible and it appeared to have been toying with the Jaffa chasing it, as the footprints reverse direction many times."

"You have still not told me why you believe the damage to the third glider was done with claws." Borok reminded when it appeared that his student had gone on a tangent.

"Many of the trees bore claw marks, some faint and some deep. We also saw them in the tree tops, so it must also be capable of climbing as well."

"It is no creature if it is intelligent enough to operate a staff cannon and toy with pursuers in such a manner." Borok said contemplatively. "Show me what you found, I wish to see it for myself."

He had to make certain that his idiot students hadn't gone from being too sceptical to being too gullible after all.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Several hours later, they were back at the palace and much to Borok's masterfully hidden shock, his students had been entirely correct.

The barefooted god could indeed move at insane speeds and did indeed possess claws that could tear apart metal. He was less shocked about that than he was over the fact that his students had actually been entirely correct. Perhaps there was some hope for them yet.

It was well into the night now, so the group of Jaffa equipped torches as they moved into the palace. Borok had considered making camp for the night and continuing the search in the morning, but Ra had demanded answers as soon as possible. It would mean that they were much more likely to miss something important, but one did not lightly ignore orders from one's god.

It became immediatelly apparent that the palace had also been looted. Many rooms were stripped bare or nearly so, with only the occasional decorative trinket left behind. Banaded's personal quarters had not been spared this either, even his sarcophagus had been taken.

The inspection of the room where Banaded conducted his deals was the most interesting by far. An altercation of some sort had clearly taken place here. A small table lay smashed against the wall and a Ma'tok staff with its bulbous firing end crushed had been left carelessly on the ground. The deep indentation of fingers was more obvious here than it had been on the staff cannon, making it clear what had happened.

Borok suspected that this was where it had all started, but did not mention it to his students. He had nothing solid to base his suspicions on, but for this room to have been used at all, Banaded must have invited the invader inside.

A short way down the hall, they found four lines gouged into the wall and easily identified them as claw marks by this point.

Next they made their way to the slave quarters, which were adjacent to the palace wing where new slaves were trained. As had been the case with the rest of the palace, it was stripped bare.

There they found the body of a single Jaffa priestess bearing the symbol of Ra, her body in the same state of decay as Banaded's had been.

"Master, I do not understand." One of the Jaffa began. "Why was this one killed instead of taken?"

"I do not know." Borok said as he inspected the body. He was glad to see that the priestess had at least not been violated before her death. Jaffa were generally too disciplined for such deplorable behavior, but it did happen occasionally that the warriors of an enemy god would take such liberties with either the priestesses or the slave women of a defeated planet. Jaffa that sunk to such dishonorable behavior were usually quielty disposed of by their fellows if something else did not take their lives first.

"She was grabbed by the throat with one hand and had her neck broken with the a push of the thumb. A quick death." Borok pronounced after taking a look at the bruising on her neck and jaw, still visible despite the decay.

The younger Jaffa stayed in respectful silence for the life of the priestess, already knowing who had done it. Breaking a persons's neck required a certain amount of strength and could not be done with with just the thumb unless the owner of said thumb was monstrously strong.

Borok led them deeper into the palace, going where Ra had instructed them to go in order to retrieve the magic crystals that Banaded had in his keeping. All Jaffa knew of the crystals that held the magic of the gods and allowed their great starships to fly. Ra had said that he suspected that the enemy god who had destroyed Banaded would have taken them, but they were to look just in case.

As they had half expected, the crystals were gone, stolen just like most everything else on the planet. With nothing left for them there, Borok and his students wrapped the decaying body of the dead priestess in one of the few curtains that hadn't been stolen and buried her.

While Borok continued to puzzle over who could have possibly done this, his students mentally cursed the abomination that had blasphemed against their god and slain his servants Banaded and the unfortunate priestess, hoping that he would suffer for his actions.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Naruto was at that moment suffering his wife's silent displeasure as he walked next to her through the palace. Akitsu was on her other side, holding the horned woman's arm between her breasts in a not very subtle attempt to distract her.

It wasn't working too well because Xanna was not as easily distracted from her irritation with sexual invitations as Naruto might have been.

It had been almost a week since the last of the people from Saral had come through the stargate, which had been an endevour that had taken almost a full day in and of itself.

Naruto had been the last to leave Saral, carrying the heaviest of their ill gotten gains through the gate. While he'd been supplying power to the gate to keep it open indefinitely, Xanna had needed to keep the whole thing organized on the other side. They had made some preparations for receiving a large influx of people, but it would have been fairly chaotic even then, with twice as many people it was nigh unmanageable.

This was one of those rare situations where you became glad that your enemy was so stupid, in this case with their ship design.

The Ha'tak mothership was the mainstream ship used by all Goa'uld. They were all pretty much identical and they were the 'one size fits all' solution of the Goa'uld, a truly textbook example of putting too many eggs in one basket. It was a capital warship, troop transport, carrier and even cargo ship if need be. It could even land on a planet if whichever Goa'uld flying it wanted to really make an entrance, something that even Naruto (who had no experience with spaceships whatsoever) could tell was fucking stupid for a ship that was well over half a kilometer long and wide.

Then again, there was alot about the ship itself that he felt was stupid besides the people who typically owned it. The pyramidal core and triangular superstructure around it gave the thing way too many angles. Sure, it had sixty rather powerful plasma cannons, but only a small number of those cannons could actually fire at a target at any given time due to its shape, not to mention the lack of variety in their weaponry. Plasma weapons for their infantry, their fighters, their stationary defences, their bombers and their capital ships. They didn't even have any point defense guns to fight off swarms of fighters and bombers.

Naruto had been hoping to see some frickin lasers but oh well, he'd just have to make his own. Good thing that Sekirei ship he'd appropriated had some.

But the troop transport part of the Ha'tak actually came in handy this time, no matter how dumb it was to have a front line capital ship double as a troop transport. It could comfortably hold 400-500 Jaffa, depending on how much of it was used as a barracks, but in the current situation it was uncomfortably being used as a temporary home by over a thousand people.

That still left about nine thousand homeless that needed taking care of, but it was something and Erius was currently in early summer, so nobody was in danger of freezing to death. Fortunately, the city of Hesa wasn't too far north of the equator, so the temperatures didn't drop particularly low even during winter. The people certainly hadn't complained much, though that was probably because they were used to being slaves and not being allowed to complain.

Things had still been racter hectic though.

Nearly every moment since their return from Saral had been spent trying to figure out what to do with so many people. They had not slept, eaten, had sex or done anything else save directing the efforts to settle them somewhere. None of that was necessary for them to do and it was no hardship for them to go without, but Xanna tended to get crabby without those things. Sex and sleep were activities of pleasure and relaxation that she had gotten used to and did not enjoy going without, while eating was one of the few things that had not gotten dull over the millenia and she'd gotten attached to it.

Aside from being pretty much the only people keeping things even vaguely organized, Naruto had also been performing large amounts of manual labor, such as hauling heavy loads of stone and wood for the construction of new homes, hewing said stone into more manageable sizes along with various other things. He wasn't particularly pleased with the lack of sex either and the work had at least been a half decent distraction.

Xanna had kept most of her focus on keeping track of things and directing efforts to make the labor as efficient as possible, as well as using a number of Jaffa as a makeshift police force to prevent any altercations from happening.

The work was not nearly done and would likely take a several more weeks before the new population was even vaguely settled in and the people currently inhabiting the Ha'tak could move out, followed by the long process of integrating them completely. He was familiar enough with the concept of culture shock to know that you couldn't just mash two disparate peoples together and expect them to mesh perfectly.

With the ability to clone themselves, they could have quite easily given themselves a break while still getting shit done, but much to Naruto's puzzlement, Xanna didn't want to do it because it would be 'cheating'.

To Naruto, cheating was a way of life. For Xanna it had long since become necessary to exercise some restraint or else ruin your own fun.

He could understand her desire to limit the use of their powers on an intellectual level, but why was she so damn annoyed by it when she was doing it to herself? It was times like this that Naruto became certain that she'd chosen correctly when she'd decided to take a female form.

Immediately after the thought passed through his head, a fist caught him in the jaw and sent him crashing into a wall, though not hard enough to do more than crack it.

"That is not the cause of my displeasure my idiot husband." Xanna said scathingly, tearing her other hand away from Akitsu's grip in irritation. "I was aware that refraining from the use of our power to speed things along would mean that we would need to put that much more personal effort into it long before the idea to rule an empire even entered your thoughts. Even your blunder with the size of the population you've just abducted was not so bad since you at least had the foresight to bring along plenty of food."

Though it did point out the fact that they should have prepared better for a large influx of people. Despite her wishes otherwise, a considerable amount of cheating would need to take place to provide for the new population.

"What I _am_ displeased with is how casually you've undermined our authority."

Naruto had raised his hands in surrender at her tirade, though he couldn't keep himself from grinning at how hot she looked when she was mad. He knew she wasn't _really_ mad at him anyway. The last sentence just plain confused him though. "How did I undermine our authority? Last I checked everyone was still doing as as we said."

"You did it by allowing those children to braid your hair!" She snapped in exasperation.

"I had to admire that little girl's guts for just walking up behind me and starting to play with my hair without even asking for permission and the others just sort of joined in afterwards." He shrugged, not at all sorry.

The girl's mother had been terrified out of her mind at what her daughter had done though. That had been vaguely funny too.

"Naruto, she couldn't have been more than three years old and probably didn't even register that your hair was attached to you. That is not an indication of 'guts', but a lack of cognitive development." Xanna replied dryly.

"The others were older and ballsy enough to do it." He pointed out.

"They could hardly be intimidated by you when you had a three year old wiping her spit stained fingers in your hair."

"I...have no argument to support myself." Naruto capitulated. "But I don't get what's so bad about letting them braid my hair."

"It is bad because if they do not fear us, we will eventually be inundated with requests to use our power to help them with all of their inane little problems." She explained, slightly frustrated at his shortsightedness.

She'd even heard people refer to her as a merciful goddess, clearly demonstrating how out of hand things were getting. She hadn't even done anything particularly merciful.

Naruto swaggered forward and pressed her into the wall, bringing his mouth very close to hers before he answered. "Then we say no."

"So it is that simple now, but when I suggested that we kill half of the people you took to make things easier, it was 'going too far'?" Xanna asked archly.

"I know that I'm the newbie here, but mass murder seems like a bad starting point for a society." He answered sardonically, knowing that the suggestion had been only half joking. "Now come on, lets go catch up on the sex we missed out on and you can make it up to Akitsu for almost making her cry."

The Ice Sekirei started a bit at suddenly being spoken about, having retreated a short distance away, where she had been wringing her hands anxiously.

"Ah...it's okay, I wasn't going to cry." She muttered quietly, only lying a little bit. The rough way that the horned woman had torn her hand away had made her tear up at little, but she hadn't been about to cry. It just seemed so silly to be upset over something so minor when Naruto had been punched into a wall and managed to grin about it. It was just that it had been a week since they'd had any time for her and she'd been so happy about it that the sudden violence had been really distressing.

Naruto rolled his eyes at the subdued response. "Sure you weren't. Now do you want to join in on the fun or not?"

Akitsu smiled shyly and fidgeted as she answered. "Ah...yes."

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Xanna frowned to herself as she closed the door to the royal quarters behind her and made her way down the hall. The past day of 'catching up' on lost time had done a lot for her ill temper, but it had also raised some other questions.

Akitsu.

What the hell were they doing with that girl anyway?

The Ice Sekirei certainly was fun to have around for several reasons. Notably for her habit of giving the impression that she was some helpless girl that was abused on a constant basis by the scary horned people. It was always amusing to see people's reaction to that one, though it wasn't likely to come into play for some time now. A pity.

The other thing was her submissive personality. Xanna had always liked being in control and Naruto was too wild to be submissive to anyone or anything for very long, even her(which she had to admit was somewhat refreshing even if his unique form of obsession with her wasn't looking like it would ever loosen its grip on him). The Ice Sekirei felt positively blissfull in the presence of two such dominant personalities.

Like right now, when Naruto was pinning her to the bed, covering her completely with his much larger body as he thrust into her with just enough restraint to keep it from being painful. Despite being more than ready to fall asleep from exhaustion, Akitsu still eagerly kept her legs spread for him, moaning in near delirium as he took her.

The horned woman shook the image out of her mind before she got the urge to go back in there and rejoin them. She'd left the fun a bit early this time to think about the situation, not to get herself horny again.

Akitsu had been extra attentive to her this time, no doubt still feeling deep inside that she had to make up for the minor irritation Xanna had felt at having her arm occupied while she'd been punching her husband.

It was beyond obvious that the Ice Sekirei had attached herself to them so completely that to cut her loose now would destroy her. Xanna would have had no real compunction about doing so anyway despite her fondness of the Ice Sekirei, but Naruto would object to it severely.

For her, Akitsu was only been supposed to be a fun plaything for a while before they moved on, but she'd been so much fun that the situation had just dragged on.

She snorted at the thought. Naruto used to be just a fun plaything too and now she was married to him.

Akitsu was so submissive that any thoughts about not wanting to share Naruto with her were moot. If anything, if was the Sekirei being shared between the two of them, but it was still a deviation from the plan that Xanna had envisioned for the two of them and she hated deviations from the plan.

Granted, it hadn't been much of a plan. Basically just 'enjoy our divinity for as long as possible before eternal life made everything so boring that we want to die'.

Then have Naruto find a way to utterly obliterate their existence. If anyone could find a way to kill the unkillable, it would be him. Much to her shock, Naruto's own power had started mutating, his unforeseen manifestation of Rinnegan abilities proved it. Initially, it would have been simple to take back what she had given him with the Chakra Fruit, now it would pose some negligible difficulty. If this continued, he would eventually be completely independent of her.

Not truly a concern given his devotion to her, merely unexpected. She trusted him completely and knew that nothing would change between them due to this, but it highlighted the fact that a means to end their existence needed to be found for the inevitable day when the burden of eternity became too heavy.

That was still a long, _long_ way into the future though, so she hadn't mentioned it to him yet. Not that it would do any good anyway, he would just shrug, grin and refuse to think about it until it happened.

Same thing with the Akitsu situation. He likely hadn't devoted even half a second of thought to where they were going with her and was just going with the flow.

Her thoughts on the subject were interrupted when she passed through the throne room, which now sported a far more impressive and tasteful dual throne of polished obsidian furnished with comfortable blood red coushins. In fact, most of the palace had already been redecorated so that it was more to their tastes instead of the gold obsessed Goa'uld.

The decor of the throne room was not what stopped her in her tracks though, but the dozen or so nervous looking women waiting in it. If she did not miss her guess, they were all from either Banaded's serving staff or personal harem. While they had not been a priority, Naruto's...peculiarities...regarding women had ensured that they were well treated, so their presence here was something of an oddity.

"Yes?" Xanna prompted, instantly bringing the women to attention. Apparently Naruto had managed to convince them to stop kneeling all the time, though it did look as if they had just barely restrained the impulse to get down on their knees.

"My lady, we wish to offer our services to lord Naruto." The one that seemed to be the designated speaker said with a small quaver in her voice.

"Is that so?" Xanna murmured to herself too quietly to hear and discreetly scanned their minds. Naruto had let it be known that none of the former harem girls or pleasure slaves would be required to do the same under their rule, but most of them were here for exactly that purpose anyway.

They seemed to be of the opinion that Naruto was the only real power here, which was irritating but understandable given that they'd come from a society where the only authority had been a male. Well, a worm pretending to be a male, but it amounted to the same thing in the end.

In short, they felt a bit lost and unsure of what to do with themselves. Despite being slaves, they'd actually enjoyed a very comfortable life so far. Abused, malnourished and tormented women weren't very attractive after all, unless you were a particularly sick individual. Their duties hadn't even been demeaning from their point of view thanks to their upbringing, so the only reluctance they felt in offering themselves as harem girls was Naruto's frigtening appearance. They were doing this with the hope that in return they would get to continue to live in the luxury that they were accustomed to.

Though there was one among them that Banaded had apparently favored, causing the woman to think that he had loved her and she was now planning to assassinate Naruto after he had sex with her and fell asleep. Cute, but misguided on so many levels.

The whole thing was misguided actually, Naruto wouldn't be interested in a harem. He chased other women for the thrill of seducing them rather than the pleasure of sleeping with them. It wasn't as if any of them could even remotely compare to her after all.

Xanna wasn't interested in a harem either, but there was one thing that she could use these women for. She'd already decided to put off making any decision about Akitsu, so this would be as good a distraction as any.

"How good are you at giving massages?"

"We were well trained." The apparent speaker for the group said with a bit of hope.

"Good." Xanna purred and started walking to another room, disrobing as she went. Before she was completely naked, she manifested her ten tails and kept them wrapped around her midsection to make it seem as if they were always there. "Come show me then."

The women muttered amongst each other in shock at seeing the tails unfold, but hastened to follow when they made an unmistakable beckoning gesture.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Alone in an absurdly opulent room that was heavily decorated with gold, a young and very handsome, Egyptian looking boy of perhaps seventeen years of age was frowning. At least he gave the appearance of being a boy, though the age and malice in his eyes gave lie to that first impression.

This was Ra, Supreme System Lord of the Goa'uld Hegemony, and he was confused. As someone that was around ten thousand years old, he didn't get confused often.

The emptying of Saral had been a surprising development, but he'd not expected it to be so puzzling. Vacating an entire planet was usually done with orbital bombardment or with an army of Jaffa sweeping it clean. It was not done often because large numbers of human slaves could be difficult to replace, so they usually only suffered minor casualties during conflicts between Goa'uld.

Taking the people but leaving the planet was a new tactic, which he'd assumed one of his rivals had cooked up for some reason. Borok's report on what tracks they had found seemed to contradict this however. He'd been disbelieving when the aged Jaffa had told him that a barefooted man had lifted a fully loaded cargo crate all by himself and carried it through the stargate, more than one even. He had considered if perhaps the old Jaffa's mind had finally failed him.

Borok was as sharp as ever though and his assessment of the tracks gave little choice but to believe him.

This forced Ra to consider who could have done this. One of his fellow Goa'uld might have conceivably developed some technology that would allow for such a strength increase, but they would never sully their feet by walking barefoot. Especially not on a planet swarming with disgusting cattle that left their droppings everywhere.

Furthermore, Borok's claims that the 'enemy god' had claws capable of shearing through stone and metal also argued against it being one of them. Unlike the Jaffa, Ra knew physics and knew that natural claws simply couldn't do that. Nor was it possible to crush a staff weapon in one's fist or leap high enough to take a death glider out of the air. The Unas were the most physically powerful race that the Goa'uld had encountered so far and even with a symbiote enhancing the lizard creature's native strength, they couldn't have done that. Though Goa'uld who had used Unas hosts did often walk barefoot due to the creatures clawed toes, Borok had been adamant that the footprints matched that of a human.

Some new technology employed by a rival Goa'uld was the most logical explanation and Ra wanted it for himself as soon as possible.

The most baffling part of this came from what Borok and his students had found in front of his desecrated temple. That was in and of itself an act that angered him greatly and he would enjoy making his displeasure known once the defiler was found.

Ra, the same as Borok, could not decipher the meaning of the three golden chalices no matter how much he thought about it. Why would anyone put animal excrement into a cup made of gold? Why would someone put excrement in _any_ kind of cup? Or a dead symbiote for that matter?

The stone tablet with the carving of male genitalia was even more confusing. It somehow seemed like an incredibly immature thing to do.

Regardless, Ra might not be able to understand the exact meaning of these things, but he knew that he was offended by it and that was all that he truly cared about if one was to be completely honest.

Banaded's death didn't phase him much at all. The minor Goa'uld had been a useful underling because he lacked the will and ambition to rebel against him even if he wasn't loyal, but there were plenty more like him. They probably wouldn't be quite as good as Banaded at governing a planet, but that was alright. Keeping slaves under control only took so much skill after all.

The blow to his reputation, and therefore his ego, was far worse than the loss of a minor trade planet whose only real value was the slightly higher quality of trained slaves it tended to produce. There were always more slaves after all, but he would lose face in the eyes of his fellow Goa'uld for having his planet attacked like this and his temple defiled, which could be dangerous given Sokar's briefly successful rebellion recently. He would have preferred to keep the fate of Saral entirely quiet if possible, but too many had already known of it. If there was one thing worse than having a planet deep in your territory invaded like this, it was trying to cover it up and failing. The whole thing made him burn with the desire to demonstrate to the attacker why it was unwise to slight the Sun God.

Unfortunately, he had no idea who had done this. Banaded and the priestess had been dead much too long for the sarcophagus to be capable of reviving them and there were no other witnesses.

It could have been one of his rival Goa'uld, but they would probably not have attacked Saral if that were so. It was too much of a high risk target for too little gain.

The idea that it might have been the Tok'ra was dismissed out of hand. Those rebellious traitors were a nuisance at best and survived only by hiding in caves. Evacuating ten thousand humans would have only served to compromise their stealth while gaining them nothing of any true worth.

The Asgard were a far likelier possibility. The advanced race certainly had the power and technology for it, but the method was all wrong. Had it been them, one of their monstrously powerful ships would have come and used its weaponry to disintegrate every Goa'uld structure and Jaffa warrior on the planet. By all accounts, this was a strictly ground based attack and Ra knew that the little grey aliens were physically very frail. They would have never left the safety of their ships to engage in such a confrontation. Not to mention that the Asgard didn't leave any bodies behind, such as those found of the priestess and Banaded that had been found by Borok and his students.

Besides, Ra couldn't recall doing anything lately that would instigate their wrath.

So either this was some new race with an unknown agenda, or one of his rivals playing some clever game. Ra could not be certain either way. The Jaffa tracks pointed at a Goa'uld, but everything else seemed to point at something else entirely.

He would find out one way or another, and when he did, he would make sure that the offender suffered for their insolence greatly before they were finally allowed to die.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

_Some weeks later_.

In another part of the Galaxy, beneath the ground of an otherwise abandoned planet, a webwork of crystal tunnels stretched.

This was the base of the Tok'ra(one of them anyway), a resistance movement of rebel Goa'uld symbiotes The vast majority of them had been spawned by the Goa'uld Queen Egeria, who hadn't liked the path that her race was taking and decided to rebel against them. The Tok'ra, like their mother, wanted no part in the evil perpetrated by others of their kind and their goal was to end the reign of the Goa'uld. Not through war or open military action, but through infiltration, sabotage, subterfuge and assassination.

Despite being in operation for thousands of years, they had only limited success in accomplishing this goal.

The biggest hurdle was the Supreme System Lord himself. As Ra was powerful enough to force all the others into compliance, he incidentally also kept most of the other System Lords from open war with each other, which was the exact opposite of what the Tok'ra wanted.

Assassinating Ra would have been a crowning achievement for them, causing the loosely aligned Goa'uld Empire to collapse into infighting and allowing them more opportunities to whittle away at their power.

Unfortunately, Ra was well aware of this and justifiably paranoid about it. Intensely so, especially after he had captured Egeria and presumably killed her. He never interacted with his underlings face-to-face to prevent Tok'ra who managed to infiltrate his ranks from having even a chance at killing him, he had all his food tested for poison and the only Jaffa allowed to be in his presence were the ones that he chose personally when they were children.

Worse still, for a Tok'ra to even enter his service as a minor Goa'uld was a feat, as Ra tended to be a lot more careful in the selection of his underlings than other Goa'uld.

They _did_ manage it every so often though, and they happened to have an agent among Ra's underlings at the moment. An operative that had just recently passed on some very interesting information.

"What is so important on Saral that it would prompt an attack such as this?" Grand Councilor Garshaw, the second highest ranked Tok'ra asked, unable to remember anything of importance ever happening on that particular planet. She had barely been aware of its existence before this had happened.

"Nothing." Anise, a scientist and historian rather than a field operative, answered succintly. "It has no naquadah deposits or any significant amounts of other precious metals, nor was there any technology being developed there. Saral has been deep in Ra's dominion for millenia and has never even been invaded by a rival Goa'uld. By all accounts, it was just a minor trade planet with almost no value."

"Could Ra have been hiding something on it that another Goa'uld somehow learned of?" Delek, another member of the Tok'ra high council, asked.

"No, if that were the case then Ra's reaction would have been much stronger. He is angered over the loss of face it caused him, but is not mobilizing a fleet." Selmak dismissed.

The others nodded their agreement with the logic. Though Selmak was not on the council(because he had repeteadly refused when the position was offered), his voice carried a lot of weight due to him being one of the oldest and most successful Tok'ra operatives.

"What cause would anyone have to attack it then?" Garshaw said, repeating her earlier question.

The meeting descended into silence as they tried to think of what possible purpose that attack could have had.

"They took the only thing of value from the planet, its people." Selmak finally said.

"I agree, but why Saral? There are thousands of worlds that would have been easier targets, many of them completely undefended save for the threat of retribution." Anise spoke in support of Selmak's analysis.

"To show that they could of course." Delek said derisively. "I am sure that whichever Goa'uld did it would have been gloating already if they were not so afraid of Ra's vengeance."

His was not an unfounded claim, as the uncontrollable arrogance of the Goa'uld had in fact been their greatest asset since the very beginning. It was a rare Goa'uld indeed who managed to do something without bragging about it, making the lot of them quite terrible at any kind of subterfuge. Their ego simply didn't let them be anything but flamboyant.

"We should not be so quick to assume that it was another Goa'uld." Garshaw cautioned. "None of our other operatives have reported such movements among those who we have infiltrated."

"We do not have spies among them all." Delek pointed out in turn. "Not to mention that it was supposed to have been executed by Jaffa."

"True, " Garshaw conceded. "but remember what our agent heard. Despite the presence of Jaffa, whoever led them does not sound like a Goa'uld. Aside from the complete lack of any sign of who had done this, the physical features that Ra's trackers reported the invader to have..."

"You do not seriously believe that rumor that he has claws that can cut through stone do you?" Delek asked with some incredulity.

"That rumor had to have come from somewhere." Garshaw countered. "Aside from that, there are enough other inconsistencies to cast doubt on the idea of it being done by a Goa'uld."

"Could it have been the doing of our brethren?" Anise asked, knowing that there were other Tok'ra cells scattered across the Galaxy. Having all of them in the same place would be far too dangerous.

She knew that the Tok'ra sometimes assassinated Goa'uld and freed the populations ruled by them, though it was not done for entirely altruistic reasons. Since the Tok'ra did not take unwilling hosts, recently freed and grateful populations were often the best places to find willing ones.

"No, we do not have the means shelter that many humans." Selmak explained. Anise had never been in a situation that would require her to understand the logistics of moving so many people. "Such a thing would require an already established infrastructure."

They all went silent for a time, all thinking the same thoughts. If it was neither them nor the Goa'uld, then it had to have been a third party. The problem was that none of them could think of any established power that would do this.

The Asgard would not have been subtle, they would have asserted their will by openly attacking with their overwhelmingly powerful ships. But the Asgard rarely did so unless the Goa'uld violated the Protected Planets Treaty that had been brokered some centuries ago.

There were some human worlds out there that were at least moderately advanced, but they were highly isolationist and wouldn't have provoked the Goa'uld like this.

"I do not believe we will be able to solve this mystery just yet." Garshaw finally spoke up, clearly ending the meeting. "Selmak, you will inform the other cells of this. Anise, consult the historical records to see if you can find any mention of a similar event happening."

The two Tok'ra nodded their assent and left the council chamber, leaving the two councilors alone.

"I wonder if this new player, if it is a new player, would be open to an alliance." Garshaw mused.

"For all we know they are just as bad as the Goa'uld." Delek countered. "And we have no way to contact them either way."

"True, though I suspect we will solve this mystery soon enough." Garshaw said. The Tok'ra received intelligence from across the Galaxy after all, both from their own operatives and from various human informants. There was only so long that anyone could hide before becoming known.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

_Several months later._

Entirely uncaring of the fact that he'd kicked over an anthill with his little stunt and all the clues he'd left behind, Naruto let out a pleased rumble at the soft hands kneading the muscles on his back.

While it hadn't been quite as fast paced as that first week, he and Xanna had still had a lot of work with all the new people he'd brought from Saral, but the worst was finally over. Everybody had a home and aside from the mild cheating that had been done with the food supply, they hadn't needed to use their powers much.

Semi-predictably, Ra's priesthood was trying(and failing) to incite rebellion. The people were firmly on his and Xanna's side now, so they didn't have much to work with. Still, they were being watched to prevent them from trying anything reprehensibly stupid, such as killing anyone. Most of them had simmered down and accepted their new situation, but there were always those few diehards that were determined to cause trouble, so they were being observed in case another tragic fall down the stairs needed to happen.

He definitely wasn't doing raiding another planet with so little preparation even if things were under control now though, it had messed up everything else and set back their plans to build a school by several months.

At least things were mostly back on track, except for one little detail.

"Does it please you my lord?" The girl sitting on his lower back and massaging him asked.

"Yes Tia, you're very good at this." He complimented in a near mumble without opening his eyes.

He'd been only mildly surprised to hear that his wife had appropriated over a dozen girls as masseuses while he'd been...distracted...with Akitsu. He certainly had no problem with it. Banaded had sent them back to the human settlement once they got too old for his tastes or sometimes even killed them, but he intended to start them up as the next batch of potential teachers. They would just happen to be masseuses at the same time.

Besides, school had always been a good place for matchmaking and they might find someone they liked during that time.

Tia was the would-be assassin that Xanna had told him about. They'd been playing games with her ever since, never quite allowing an opportunity to present itself. It had been fun playing hard to get with her attempts at seducing him.

She wasn't the only one trying to seduce either him or Xanna, but she'd been the most fun to play with because she wanted to kill him. Though the other girls assumption that Akitsu was a favored concubine had been rather amusing, especially their adorable attempts to replace her. That kind of power jockeying shouldn't have surprised him, but it had.

Xanna had laughed at him and told him that he was too used to women that would sooner die than live as part of a harem.

Eventually they'd gotten bored of frustrating Tia and Naruto had decided to give her a perfect opportunity to attempt killing him since she obviously wasn't intending to give up. He had to admire her persistence at least.

This time instead of getting a group massage along with Xanna and Akitsu, he'd asked Tia to follow him somewhere nice and private to let her have a shot at him.

They were in one of those seemingly useless rooms that every overblown palace had. Comfortably furnished and decorated, but nobody could tell you what exactly it was good for. This particular one was full of furniture, some of which wasn't exactly native to this dimension.

Naruto was currently layed face down on a large pillow type thing, while Tia sat on his back and massaged him.

"Thank you my lord." She replied and continued kneading.

After a few more minutes of silence, Naruto pretended to doze off to make her more comfortable.

Tia forced down her slight nervousness and focused on her anger at this 'man'. Though he'd been kind and had never so much as glared at her, she just couldn't forgive him for killing Banaded. She was certain that her dead master had loved her, he'd favored her and taken care of her ever since she was a child after all!

Silently but quickly so as not to arouse suspicion, she drew a small dagger from a hidden pocket that she'd sown into her clothing herself. A weapon was remarkably hard to come by on this new world, but she had fortunately taken this dagger from Banaded's palace.

After taking a deep breath to fortify herself, Tia stabbed the dagger downward with all the force she could muster, eliciting a grunt and tensing from the horned man under her as the blade sank into his flesh. Within moments, his body slackened and he let out a deep exhale.

With shaking hands, Tia stood up, before the blood welling from the wound reached her. She'd done it! She'd avenged her master and now this pretender was dead by her hand!

"You missed." Naruto said in a bored tone and pushed himself to his feet.

Tia yelped fearfully and backpedalled.. "B-b-but I killed you!"

"Pro tip: If you want to kill someone, you should stab them in the heart or lungs, not the spleen." He replied in the same bored tone. "Besides, didn't you see me walking out of a ship that I deliberately crashed into the ground?"

Seeing that the terrified woman wasn't going to answer him, he turned his back on her to present the handle of the knife buried in his back. "Could you pull this thing out? It's getting a bit uncomfortable."

Robotically, she approached and grabbed hold of the handle and pulled it out...only to slam it back in with an enraged yell, followed by an escape to the symphony of frustrated female crying.

"Ah, the wonders of Stockholm Syndrome. That should be fun." Naruto commented wryly to the empty room. "At least she hit my liver this time."

The room failed to answer him.

Undaunted by the silence, he grabbed hold of the dagger, ripped it out and continued speaking. "What do you think? Is it going to be fun to play therapist with that one?"

"Impressive that you can see me even when I do not wish to be seen." The room seemed to reply in a female voice.

"No it isn't." Naruto said dismissively, turning to the now visible visitor.

It was another one of the ascended, though this one was slightly older in appearance than Ganos Lal had been, perhaps in her late thirties at the most though. She had auburn hair and was wearing a modest white dress of a similar design as the one Ganos had worn.

"So... who are you?" he asked flippantly he'd taken in her apperance.

"I am Oma Desala." The ascended woman answered serenely.

"And you are here because?" He prompted, crashing heavily into a nearby couch and sprawling into it bonelessly.

"Curiosity." Oma answered shortly, remaining in a standing position despite there being a comfortable looking armchair available. For one thing, she didn't have a physical body so it didn't really make any difference and for another, she hadn't been invited to do so. "You and your wife caused a mild panic among the Ascended when Ganos suddenly vanished from their senses."

"You don't say?" He snorted with some derision. "Did you decide to come talk to me instead of my wife because you're intending to ride me like a pony?"

Oma was unruffled by his innuendo, having expected something of the sort. "No, I merely estimated that out of the two of you, you were more likely to speak to me amicably."

"Translation: You were afraid she was going to wrap you in leather and shove a pinecone up your ass." Naruto snickered.

Oma remained silent while he laughed, fighting the urge to cringe at the mental image. Not exactly something she'd considered, but Xanna was far too much of an unknown to be considered safe to approach. Despite his outwardly abrasive manner and downright insulting form of speech, the horned blond seemed to be the less volatile of the two.

"Heheheh..." Naruto's amusement trailed off with a sigh. "Didn't Ganos convey our message to you stiffs clearly enough? We're not going to stop and you can't make us, so I really don't see what possible reason you could have for wanting to talk to me."

"On the contrary, I would like to see you continue doing as you have done so far." She said with a small smile.

Naruto's eyebrows climbed higher on his forehead in surprise and a grin began to pull at his lips. "Go on..."

"The Ascended are not united in their belief that non-interference is the best policy. There is a small minority of us who are of the opinion that it was our carelessness that enabled the Goa'uld to rise to their current dominance of the Galaxy and that we should work to correct this. Unfortunately, the others will not allow us to act, save in the most minor of ways. You however, are not so restricted and have already liberated thousands from slavery."

"I hate to break your heart princess, but I didn't do that out of the goodness of my heart, or because I felt sorry for them. We just needed the numbers to speed the expansion of this empire of ours." He responded flatly.

He couldn't afford to care about anyone that wasn't in his immediate vicinity. When you could instantly travel anywhere and help anyone, while simultaneously realising that there existed an infinite number of people that could use that help, you could drive yourself insane in an awful hurry if you cared too much.

And he just wasn't that nice either.

Oma's smile faded somewhat at the blunt admission, but she wasn't dissuaded just yet. "Regardless, you have been treating them well, helped them build homes, educated them and not attempted to force them to worship you despite claiming to be a god."

"Being a god doesn't mean I want anyone groveling in front of me and the people are a means to an end, I just have no reason to treat them like crap." He retorted.

"And yet, many would have been overcome by the temptation of power when they felt the spiritual strength of their worshippers flow to them." Oma argued. "There are many who worship you and your wife even though you have not demanded it, surely you felt your power increase?"

"Big whoop." He rolled his eyes sarcastically. "As if I need any more power when I already have everything I want. At this point everything is just a big game to me and more power isn't worth diddly squat. And it isn't even much of a power boost in the first place."

"Irrespective of your reasons, you are a much better alternative than the Goa'uld." Oma finally said after a few moments of silence. Perhaps not the champion she had been hoping for, but he was at least not interested in committing pointless atrocities and she had a feeling that he was deliberately trying to make himself sound worse than he actually was.

"If you say so." He replied airily. "Personally, I get the feeling that you're just hoping I'll take care of Anubis for you."

That one was a nasty piece of work and Oma was a gullible idiot for letting herself get tricked into helping a Goa'uld ascend. So much for the wisdom of the ascended. The inevitable encounter with Anubis promised to be quite interesting due to his unique situation though.

Oma stared at him in shock, not just because of his words, but because he'd spoken them in Alteran. His accent was fairly terrible, but it was still clearly understandable. She had no idea how he knew about Anubis or when he'd learned their language, but it left her too surprised to respond for a few moments.

"You're wondering how I'm able to speak this language and how I know about your screw up with Anubis." He stated with certainty, still speaking Alteran and his pronounciation improving with every word. "You weren't getting to the point, so I got bored and took it from your mind."

Mastering her surprise, Oma replied with the same calm tone that she had been using thus far. "I see. I suppose you do not care that such a violation of a person's privacy was considered a high crime in the Alteran civilization?"

That he was capable of doing it so easily and without her notice was another thing that shook her quite badly.

"Not in the slightest." He answered in the same airy tone he'd used before. "You're the one who came to me, not the other way around."

Before the ascended woman could offer any kind of reply, a thoughtful look crossed his face. "While we're on the subject of coming..."

The next thing Oma knew, there was a sudden feeling of vertigo and she found herself sitting in the previously noted armchair. More worriedly, she was also feeling long forgotten sensory input that relied on physical senses rather than spiritual ones.

"There we go, so much better than talking to a floating ghost thing." Naruto said in satisfaction.

"You've descended me." She said numbly, still feeling more than a little dazed at the abrupt transition. She could perfectly remember all of her experiences as an ascended being, but all the power available to one was out of reach. It left her feeling vulnerable in a way that she'd never felt before.

"Nah, I've just shoved you into that puppet body and temporarily shackled you to it. You're still ascended, but your power has been hijacked to keep the body alive, that's why you can't shoot lightning around and shit." He said dismissively. "Tea?"

A tea set materialised between them and Naruto busied himself pouring it into her cup and dumping the rest into a tankard for himself. Like hell was he going to bother with a dainty little cup, a man can't even sprawl properly without spilling it on himself with those damn things.

Oma didn't notice this, busy as she was staring at her arms. It felt decidedly strange to use physical eyes again after being used to not having them for thousands of years. After the initial shock wore off, she noticed something a bit...odd.

"Yeah, I made your body younger. I figured 'Why would I look at a middle aged woman if I could look at one in the prime of her life?'. Naruto admitted before any questions could be asked. "Have a look."

A mirror appeared in front of her and Oma stared at the image of a young woman that stared back at her. It was her face, but without the signs of age. She hadn't been particularly old when she'd ascended, but the beauty of youth had already started abandoning her.

She also noted that her clothing had changed to something a bit less modest. It was still the same dress, but it was noticeably tighter and the neckline lower. Not that the dress had been anything but a projection of her will earlier, but he'd obviously altered it to suit his own preferences.

Taking a calming breath so steady herself at yet another abrupt shock, she gave her 'host' a level look and spoke with as much of her shattered serenity as possible. "You are doing this to keep me off balance."

"Among other things." He addmited with amusement. "Drink your tea woman, you don't want it getting cold. Not to mention how rude it is."

Finding it strangely difficult to resist the urge to make a scathing retort on the subject of rudeness, Oma nonetheless reached for the offered tea and brought it to her lips.

...and promptly spilled it when she was reminded that physical bodies generally do not like coming into contact with hot liquids.

Naruto roared with laughter at how inept the 'wise and powerful' ascended were when you shoved them back into physical bodies. Thousands of years of of experience as fleshless spirits wasn't going to vanish in a few minutes after all.

Oma considered herself a very patient person. Millenia of life, and more importantly, millenia of putting up with her fellow ascended restricting her at every turn when she tried to help people on the lower planes demanded a lot of patience. Then there was the occasional mortal that stumbled across one of her sanctuaries and started learning the secrets of ascension. Some of them could be incredibly irritating at first.

Dealing with Naruto required a different kind of patience altogether though. None of those previously mentioned disrespected her so blatantly her or engineered situations where she would make a fool of herself, only to laugh in her face when it happened. It didn't help that she once again had adrenaline, estrogen, testosterone and various other hormones, along with biologically driven emotional reactions.

So it shouldn't come as a surprise that once again having such biological factors influencing her after thousands of years without them, in combination with the gratingly annoying giggling and juvenile pointing of the horned man caused her temper to snap.

"You are an immature child!" She surged to her feet and snapped angrily, face flushed red and her scalded lips throbbing painfully in tune with her heartbeat, serving only to worsen her temper.

"If you say so granny." He snickered back, even more amused that this was her best effort a throwing an insult. "Te'lok _is_ nearly twice my age after all."

The off handed statement shocked Oma badly. Bad enough that her anger was completely forgotten. Ganos had of course told of what had happened to her and what Xanna had told her with that 'presentation'.

There had been much speculation among the Ascended about these horned newcomers, but they didn't know anything for sure. Their self-classification as 'Primordial Forces of Creation and Destruction' gave the impression of vast age, so to hear that this man was younger than the Jaffa that acted as his First Prime was shocking in the extreme.

"But how could you have come so far at such a young age?" She whispered. "Some of us have sought further enlightenment for tens of thousands of years and have been unable to progress to the next level."

"Lets just say that I'm a perversion of nature and leave it at that." He said reassuringly, forcing down another laugh.

_Enlightenment my ass. Ascension has about as much to do with enlightenment as it does with my balls._

Oh there was certainly a mental component to it, but judging from the minds of the few ascended he and Xanna had scanned, as well as the fact that a fucking Goa'uld had managed it, 'enlightenment' was most definitely not a requirement.

And what _was_ enlightenment anyway? An arbitrary scale of knowledge? A subjective scale of how much contentment a person feels in their existence or something similar? If that was the case, then the secret of enlightenment might as well be found in his balls, because it was as good an explanation as any.

While Naruto was having his philosophical moment, Oma said something that he didn't catch and wasn't interested in enough to ask her to repeat it, so he started a new thread of conversation. "Say...you've got that nice young body now. How would you like to put it through its paces and I'll fill you up with my _enlightenment juice_?"

Oma balked at his sudden leering expression as he looked her over like a piece of meat, not to mention the proposition that had nothing at all to do with what she'd just asked him.

"I have no interest in having interc-"

"Don't be hasty now." He interrupted with a creepy crooning voice, taking a slow step forward. "If you agree I'll enlighten you so hard that it'll leak out of every hole. You'll reach the next level in no time at all."

Starting to get genuinely scared and creeped out by the predatory stalk and coaxing voice, Oma backed away warily and spoke as strongly as she could, though a tremor of fear still made it into her voice. The way that her newly physical body was reacting with instinctive fear to the threatening approach wasn't helping, not to mention how terribly unused she was to any kind of threat.

"I'd like to leave now."

Naruto stopped and gave her a smile so mild that she found it nigh impossible to reconcile with the sexually driven threat he'd emanated just a moment ago. "Alright, if that's what you want. The fast way or the slow way?"

Oma understood that he was asking her about the method of disengaging her from the physical body she was currently occupying.

Unfortunately, Oma hadn't lived in a culture where everyone knew that picking 'the fast way' was often a bad idea. She just knew that she was in desperate need of some solitude where she could get her equilibrium back after getting one shock after another, followed by behaviour that had made her truly fear that she was about to be violated.

"The fast way."

She barely saw the flash of steel that came at her neck and only had time to make the briefest flinch as the Kusanagi took her head off, ejecting her forcefully from the fleshy prison that Naruto had stuffed her in.

Back in her ascended form, Oma flew away as fast as possible, ignoring the phantom sensation of steel parting flesh.

Naruto didn't try to stop her and merely snickered to himself after a few seconds. "I wonder how long it'll take her to figure out that she never got to the point of her visit...and how long it's gonna take her to come back."

When his amusement subsided, he took a look around the room that had now seen one attempted murder and one quasi-murder in the space of an hour, paying particular attention to the rapidly spreading pool of blood that the meat puppet he'd made for Oma was leaving on the floor.

He picked up the head and balanced the bloody, severed neck on his palm as he raised it into the air. "Alas, poor Oma, for I knew her well...but not as well as I'd hoped if you know what I mean."

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**Aaaaaaand, the end...of chapter three. Salutations until next time.**


	4. Chapter 4

**Review responses:**

**Guest: I would truly like to give visual aid to help you picture what Naruto and Xanna look like. Unfortunately, the average kindergartner has better drawing skills than me...seriously, even my stick figures look lopsided.**

**I'm afraid that visual aid will not be forthcoming xD.**

**And without further ado, the actual chapter!**

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_Approximately ten Earth years after the raid on Saral._

_Hasara Space Station, neutral ground for the meeting of the High Council of System Lords._

Ra had assumed that the insolent swine who had emptied his world and desecrated his temple would be easy enough to find and punish. He would just need to investigate a bit more and eventually, there would be signs pointing at the culprit. He had been fairly sure that it was one of his fellow System Lords at any rate.

Ten years and a few more emptied planets later, Ra had long since revised that opinion. Whoever was doing this, they were definitely not a System Lord, possibly not even a Goa'uld and they left no clue as to their identity.

Not to say that they didn't leave any clues at all, because they did. It was just that these clues weren't all that helpful in figuring out the identity of the mysterious attacker. Often they were merely more of the stone tablets with infuriatingly nonsensical drawings or messages carved into them.

The loss of Saral had been a fairly minor blow to his domain, important only in how it made him lose face in front of his rivals., but the continued attacks were starting to have an effect on more than just his reputation. Some of those planets were places where naquadah was mined and moving about enough slaves to get those mines operational again was a pain.

On the bright side, he wasn't the only System Lord to have suffered such attacks. He'd heard that several others had also been left with mysteriously empty planets and none of them were having any more luck figuring out who was doing this than he was.

What the constant poaching of their slaves and burning of their temples _had_ accomplished however, was garner a lot of outrage. Enough that a summit had been called.

Ra both liked and detested summits. He liked them because he could flaunt his superiority over his fellow Goa'uld and he hated them because he knew exactly what a tempting target they made for the Tok'ra.

The other System Lords thought that his demands on thorough security precautions were excessive, especially his demand that not even Lo'taur were to be present. The Hasara Space Station that had long served as a neutral meeting ground for the System Lords was after all heavily shielded, armed and protected by a fleet of Ha'tak.

Ra thought that their laxity would be their doom one day. He hadn't held on to his position as Supreme System Lord for millenia through luck, but through superior cunning and caution. The fools didn't seem to grasp that the danger of the Tok'ra was in infiltrators, not open attack. The formidabble defenses were still required of course, as some ambitious Goa'uld might think to capture the space station for themselves, but they were not going to be effective against an assassin's blade.

Regardless of his mixed feelings on these summits, it had been necessary to call one.

It hadn't been him who had called it of course...that would imply that there was something that he couldn't handle, which was clearly ridiculous since he was the Supreme System Lord.

Most System Lords attended when a summit was called, but occasionally, some of them would refuse to. This time, the meeting chamber was full, though one of the System Lords had appointed an underling to speak in their place.

Sitting in the more ornate and slightly higher chair as befit the Supreme System Lord, Ra assessed his 'compatriots'.

The closest to his right was his backstabbing, egomaniacal brother Apophis, a constant thorne in his side that obviously wanted to sit on the throne of the Supreme System Lord. Just like him, Apophis still used the same host that he had long ago acquired on Tau'ri, a dark skinned man from Ancient Egypt whose skin had paled slightly over the years due to spending so much time away from the light of the sun.

Further down from Apophis sat Bastet, who favored female hosts and oddly enough, female Jaffa as her warriors.

Ra trusted her even less than his brother and that was saying something. This extreme distrust was based almost entirely on her preference for females. A Goa'uld Queen needed a female host in order to spawn larva, unless she whished to leave the host entirely and thus leave herself vulnerable.

After the betrayals of his Queens Hathor and Egeria, Ra made sure that every Queen was kept strictly controlled and restricted to prevent another such occurence. Truth be told, it was not the betrayal itself that caused him such paranoia on the subject of Goa'uld Queens, but the fact that any Queen who gained power of her own didn't actually need anyone else. Queens could spawn larva without need of a mate or even the genetic sample of a human, though it made the larva stronger.

Hathor had wanted power of her own and had quickly risen to the rank of System Lord through judicious use of her ability to sway the minds of men by changing her host to produce a mind altering pheromone, while Egeria's spawning of the Tok'ra continued to be an irritation even millenia later. With the immense control that Goa'uld Queens could exert over their offspring and their own biology, they were far more dangerous than a regular symbiote and needed to be controlled lest they usurp him.

Fortunately, both Egeria and Hathor had been captured and put into stasis to prevent them for being a problem. Unfortunately, Hathor had been left behind on Tau'ri when the insolent slaves had rebelled and forced him off and the planet that Egeria had been entombed on had been lost in the meanwhile. He really should have killed them, but Queens were extremely valuable and he'd thought that he might be able to make some use of them in the future.

These facts were something that Ra had kept secret from his fellow Goa'uld. The fact that He'd lost control of Tau'ri because of a slave uprising of all things would have been a severe embarrassment, combined with the fact that he hadn't actually killed Egeria like the others believed might have been enough to cause them to band together and attempt to unseat him.

He'd actually lost the coordinates for Tau'ri long ago and the Asgard had since then made it clear that any attempt to find the First World again would result in dire consequences, even if that particular world was not in included in the Protected Planets Treaty. The little grey pests hadn't said what those consequences would be, but he wasn't willing to chance it. Having one of their ships decimate his fleets would be a devastating blow to his power.

He wasn't sure if Bastet was actually a Queen, but he wasn't willing to chance it, so he made sure to send his loyal attack dog(and son) Heru'ur to invade her holdings every so often to keep her weak.

Bastet was likely aware of this, but couldn't really strike back as strongly as she would have wished, so she had struck up a strong alliance and even friendship with the System Lord who sat next to her, Kali.

Kali also favored female hosts, which had drawn Ra's distrust towards her as surely as it had to Bastet. Kali too, suffered periodic attacks by Heru'ur to keep her weakened for this reason.

Much to Ra's consternation, this only made the friendship and alliance between Bastet and Kali stronger. Separately, they were weak in comparison to the other System Lords, but together they were formidable.

On the next seat over from Kali sat Nirrti, yet another one who used female hosts most of the time, though not always. Ra was _almost_ certain that Nirrti wasn't a Queen.

Not that it would have made much difference in her case, as Nirrti had the smallest military of any System Lord. Her greatest strength had always been in the devastating biological plagues she could unleash against her enemies, as well as her penchant for treachery. She was the most likely among the System Lords to stab you in the back by a wide margin.

Ra knew that Nirrti didn't actually care about her position as a System Lord, she had only claimed it to keep the others off her back while she dabbled in genetic research, selective breeding and other such pursuits in her search for the perfect host. No doubt she bitterly resented having to be present for this summit, but she was too paranoid to assign an underling to do it and too cautious pass up the information that would be gained.

After Nirrti came Olokun in a host of extremely dark complexion, who fancied himself a scientist and researcher on the level of Nirrti at least, but was in fact an incompotent idiot. It was no doubt only his well known skill in intelligence gathering and the highly defensible nature of the solar system where his throne world was located that allowed him to keep his position.

Next was Izanagi in a tall, stern faced host of Asian descent, sporting long black hair combed into a ponytail. Rumor had it that he kept his Queen, Izanami, locked in her chambers where she was allowed to do nothing but spawn new larva for him.

Ra approved of that, but doubted the wisdom of allowing his chief underling and offspring, Amaterasu, as much leeway as he did. He suspected it would end with Izanagi's death eventually.

Next was Yu-huang Shang Ti(or just Yu for short), the oldest of the System Lords by a considerable margin. He used the same host that he had used since abandoning his Unas host thousands of years ago, a chinese man with a rather ridiculous looking patch of facial hair hanging from his chin.

Yu was an oddity among the System Lords for several reasons. For one thing, he hadn't taken the persona of a god exactly, preferring to be called the Jade Emperor and he'd chosen his host based on knowledge rather than appearance. His was the largest domain after that of Ra, so he was obviously doing something right, but nobody wanted to emulate him.

Another oddity was his reputation for being trustworthy. Unlike the other Goa'uld, nobody could remember a time when Yu had broken his word, which gave him considerable leverage when negotiations had to be conducted.

Ra spared little attention for Yu despite the elder System Lord potentially being his greatest rival. Yu's domain was on the other side of the Galactic Core and they had little interaction with each other, which was how they both liked it.

Next in line was Camulus, who was all in all a fairly unremarkable Goa'uld in a pale skinned host with dark hair that he liked to keep oiled for some reason. He'd only established himself relatively recently and was not any kind of great power, but he was a good strategist and tactician.

In the next seat sat Morrigan, who was not actually a System Lord herself, but a representative of one. She used a very pale and very buxom red haired woman as a host, both of which she accentuated with a deep black corset.

Of all the Goa'uld using female hosts, Ra was the most suspicious of her. Despite not being a System Lord herself, she clearly held great favor to be allowed to represent the one she served. The fact that she was known to be cunning only exacerbated his distrust.

Mind you, Ra didn't actually know whether she was a Queen or not, but he was forever suspicious of Goa'uld that used female hosts.

In the next seat over was Svarog, who used a muscular man with blue face paint as a host. He was just as egomaniacal as Apophis but otherwise fairly unremarkable.

After Svarog came Cronus, who had some years ago come into a great deal of power and influence for once again defeating Zeus and being the one who had banished Sokar after his rebellion.

Lastly came Ba'al, the most recent Goa'uld to ascend to the rank of System Lord due to his usurping of Zeus' fleet and immediately using it to help drive off Sokar. Ra had no choice but to reward his former underling for that act, even though he knew that Ba'al would have turned on him if he'd thought that allying with Sokar would have been more advantageous.

Regardless of the problems between them, the System Lords did still band together against outside threats, such as the unknown that was poaching their slaves.

"Why was this summit called?" Nirrti asked with a certain level of impatience, speaking out of turn and earning herself Ra's irritation in the process.

"No doubt it concerns the emptying of several worlds suffered by certain System Lords, something that you would have known had you bothered to keep yourself informed." Olokun answered and taunted.

Nirrti scoffed derisively. "Whether you cannot keep your slaves from being stolen from you or not is no concern of mine. I see no reason that a summit should be called over this."

"But the summit _was_ called and you will keep your objections on the matter to yourself." Ra interjected warningly, relishing the glowering silence he received from both Olokun and Nirrti. He knew they hated him for imposing a tithe of slaves and naquadah on them long ago, but they didn't dare protest against it, knowing that he could destroy them.

That tithe would coincidentally allow him to recover from these attacks much sooner than the others.

"So our holdings were not the only ones to suffer these mysterious attacks." Morrigan picked up the conversation. "One of our worlds was suddenly emptied with little indication of who had done it. We had suspected a rival Goa'uld, but the evidence left behind seemed to contradict it."

"Claw marks in the walls, bare footprints in the ground and cryptic messages left on stone tablets or gouged into the stone?" Ra asked, fairly certain that he was right.

"Exactly so."

"Two of my worlds have been emptied in such a manner." Apophis inserted himself into the conversation, his tone agitated and angry.

"I have lost three." Yu said simply, seemingly calm.

"One of mine has been emptied some years ago, a world I favored for the skilled craft working slaves." Izanagi said, making no mention that this particular world had also been favored because the slaves there were usually quite stubborn and spirited. He always enjoyed breaking them of their defiance.

That was why he'd never stationed an underling there to do it for him, preferring to send his Jaffa to snatch a few slaves every so often.

"As has mine." Bastet said angrily. It had happened months ago, but thinking about it still made her angry. She had heard about it happening to some of the other System Lords, but had figured it to be merely the usual warring between them. She'd known it wasn't as soon as one of her own worlds was hit.

It had been a minor world in every way and it's loss was no great injury to her. What angered her was how extremely insulting the whole thing had been. Insulting enough that she had called for this summit to deal with the perpetrator, since it had been exceedingly obvious that it wasn't a Goa'uld.

_Flashback_

_Bastet ground her teeth together furiously as she stared at her desecrated temple, her Bast Guard doing their best not to shuffle nervously in the face of their goddess' anger._

_Attacks by rival Goa'uld would have been taken as a simple matter of the way things were. Sometimes her temples would be razed just as she razed theirs, a particularly brazen Goa'uld might have even defiled it, but most of the time it would have simply been repurposed for their own use._

_It went far beyond that this time though._

_Nearly every wall was defaced with rather accurate images of her. That much was something that she might have been pleased by considering how well made they were, if not for the fact that all of these images showed her being impaled on a male member._

_By far the worst was the giant sized image that was a clearly top down view of her on her knees, having the offending member shoved into her mouth while a clawed hand held her harshly by the hair. It was made even worse because the image showed her mouth barely fitting around it, while she looked upwards with an absolutely worshipful expression._

_There were similar images of herself staring worshipfully at the instantly hated male member, sometimes drooling as it spurted thick streams of what was clearly semen into her mouth and all over her face._

_Brazenly and recklessly, the man who had done this had even drawn an himself in detail on all of the ones that showed the man's face, clearly feeling no danger at all in exposing himself like this. No doubt seeking to anger her further by so casually discarding anonymity._

_Though anonymity might simply have been a lost cause for a man with horns growing from his head. If that was even his true appearance...it seemed rather unlikely._

_As a final insult, there was another image of just him, this time clothed and holding up the thumb of his right hand with a strangely infuriating smile on his face. Under that image was a short message that was possibly just as infuriating as the defilement of her temple._

_'You'll be on your knees soon after meeting me in person catgirl.'_

_In the end, she was forced to destroy the temple herself to make sure that no one ever saw it. Simply cleaning it wasn't an option, as the lewd imagery had been literally burned into the walls by some unknown means. She'd even had the Jaffa that had seen it executed to prevent them from talking about it._

_End flashback_

"And I have lost five." Ra concluded, snapping Bastet out of her angry remembrance.

"Is there any sign as to who is responsible?" Cronus asked, knowing little of the matter because none of his worlds had been attacked.

"No, the coward attacks only weak worlds and never with ships, always taking all the slaves and Jaffa with him." Izanagi answered.

"We will find who it is and see their world burned to ash for this insolence." Ra proclaimed strongly.

The next couple of hours were taken up by conversation as the System Lords figured out a time line for these attacks, intersped with constant veiled insults being hurled at each other.

Seeing the bickering made Yu want to take a torture rod to some of the worst offenders, those being Apophis, Cronus, Svarog, Nirrti and Olokun in order of irritation caused from most to least. He would have included Ra in that list, but Ra was merely being his usual condescendingly superior self rather than childish.

"Enough! We must find out who is doing this and how he chooses his targets if we are to put an end to it." Yu said forcefully, bringing some measure of order to what had rapidly descended into a room full of bickering children, each of which just so happened to be thousands of years old.

Bastet _could_ have spoken up and revealed to them what had been drawn in her defiled temple, but then they would have wanted to see it for themselves, which would mean she'd have to tell them she'd destroyed her own temple. Too many awkward questions. Besides, if the man doing this really was horned, then he'd be quite distinctive in any case.

"I believe that Saral was the first." Ra said, retaking control of the meeting, not wanting his rivals to think that Yu was somehow better than him for keeping his focus on the task at hand.

This time it took merely thirty minutes to figure out a timeline, after which they all puzzled over the seeming randomness of it. Saral had indeed been the first and Bastet's world had been the last.

"A curious pattern." Cronus said, trying to sound smart.

"What pattern?" Ba'al scoffed. "The only pattern I see is that only weak or undefended worlds are attacked."

"Silence whelp!" Cronus snapped at the much younger System Lord, incensed that he'd been called out so rudely. "That much is plain for all to see, but there is obviously a cunning mind behind the choosing of planets to be attacked."

XXXXXXXXXXXX

_Meanwhile on Erius._

"Akitsu sweetie?" Naruto said absently.

"Yes master?" The Ice Sekirei perked up, cheeks coloring slightly in pleasure at being called sweetie.

"Be a dear and give me a number between one and fifty." He couldn't very well use a twenty sided die with that many planets to choose from after all.

"Ah..." Akitsu paused, trying to think of a number. At last, she decided to give one based on the number of orgasms Naruto had given her the previous night. "thirteen."

Naruto scrolled down to the thirteenth planet on the short list of planets he'd okayed for a raid earlier and memorized the stargate address. His eyebrows climbed upwards slightly at seeing which planet the thirteenth one on the list was. That should be interesting and it might also serve a secondary purpose in leaving him absent for a longer time than normal. It was the planet of an independent minor Goa'uld that he'd learned about by raiding the data crystals on Goa'uld controlled worlds.

Yes, even years after the first attack on Saral, the Goa'uld _still_ had no concept of 'operational security'. He did have faith that they would figure it out eventually though.

Once he was done, he turned towards Akitsu and gave her a hug. "Thanks."

The Ice Sekirei sighed contently in the embrace and rubbed her cheek against his bare chest. She felt a strange urge to sneeze rising up, but pushed her nose into Naruto's chest to force it down. She didn't want to get snot all over him, even if he would probably find it funny.

"Alright, now that I've got a target I just need to tell Te'lok that we're all set to go." Naruto said after a few moments.

Akitsu made no indication that she was intending to let go anytime soon.

"You'll need to let go of me." Naruto prompted eventually.

Instead of that, Akitsu started nibbling on his nipple, using her powers to cool her spit enough that it made Naruto take a surprised inhale at the sudden coldness.

With a certain amount of regret, he pulled her away, smiling at her disappointed pout. "I'll play with you once I get back. Why don't you go find Xanna to play with in the meanwhile, I think she's reading a book in the bedroom."

"Ah...okay." She agreed in her usual subdued tone.

As soon as he'd walked out, her shoulders slumped a bit. Xanna had been having times when she was distant in the past ten years and those times were getting more frequent. It worried the passive Ice Sekirei more than she cared to admit, enough that old fears of being discarded had resurfaced.

It wasn't that Xanna had been mean or anything, just...distant. It confused and worried Akitsu terribly. She hadn't wanted to bother the horned woman if she was thinking about it, but she also knew how jealously possesive she was of her husband, so she'd also hesitated to spend too much time around Naruto.

She just wished that things could go back to how they used to be.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

_Back with the Goa'uld._

"Whatever reasoning our enemy is using to choose his targets, I can make no sense of it." Olokun admitted unhappily. "What of the messages left behind?"

"Mere nonsense." Apophis said dismissively.

"Do not be so quick to dismiss it merely because you cannot understand it." Ra spoke to his brother condescendingly.

Apophis glowered and swore to himself that Ra would suffer greatly for this insult once he defeated him.

"There may be some clues in those messages that would hint at the identity of our attacker or his next target." Ba'al suggested logically. "We should examine them carefully."

Having no reason to argue against the suggestion, the System Lords did so.

Saral had been the first, with the unhelpfully baffling carving of male genitals.

The second had been another of Ra's worlds, though this one had no Goa'uld or Jaffa presence and was only visited when Ra wanted to pick up some slaves of a paler complexion. It had a higher than normal gravity as well, and the population was generally shorter but stronger as a result.

A stone tablet with a crude representation of a face had been left there, just a circle with two dots for eyes and a curved line to represent a mouth that made it look disgustingly cheerful. This too made little to no sense to the System Lords.

"See? Mere nonsense." Apophis sneered again.

"Wait for them all to be revealed before you make such proclamations." Ra condescended again.

As it happened, the third world to be attacked was in the domain of Apophis. It had had no Goa'uld overseer, but there had been a small Jaffa Garrison present to ensure that the slaves mined the modest naquadah deposits.

The message left here was considerably more gruesome, several symbiotes of varying levels of maturity had been stabbed through their tails with hooks and hanged to dry in the sun over a nearby lake on a wooden pier. On the pier itself, a stone tablet had been left with the message _'Gone fishing.'_ carved into it.

There was no mistaking the fact that the display was meant to equate them to the worms that slaves and Jaffa often used as fishing bait and it caused them no small amount of anger.

"An obvious insult." Cronus muttered angrily, getting nods of agreement from all present.

The fourth belonged to Yu and was another of those worlds that were left unsupervised because there was no need. It was a dangerous planet with hostile wildlife _and_ plant life, which kept the population low and the humans were often grateful to get away from it, making them easily trained and obedient slaves.

It was discovered to be completely empty the same as all the others, with a simple stone tablet bearing the rather philosophical message of _'If you would divine the future, study the past.'_

The fifth was once again one of Ra's planets, another one of those that was left alone except when it struck the Supreme System lord or one of his underlings to go collect a few slaves from it. An entirely unremarkable place that might well have ended up as one of those planets that the Goa'uld simply forgot about until the native population advanced enough to draw attention to itself again, upon which time it got blasted back to the stone age from orbit.

In the middle of the now forlorn and empty village a stone tablet had been left behind. It bore the ominous and downright threatening message of _'From beneath you it devours.'_, which was completely incongruous with the tracks that spoke of a peaceful exodus.

The sixth planet belonged to Izanagi and had apparently been emptied without fuss due to the lack of Goa'uld or Jaffa presence. The stone tablet left there bore a similarly ominous, though not quite as threatening, message saying _'My flesh is forever!'_

The seventh once more belonged to Apophis, though this one had been defended by one of his minor Planet Lords. The underling in question was found under the balcony of his own palace, apparently having stumbled and fallen off according to the Jaffa trackers.

The signature stone tablet bore the more understandable but still unhelpful message of _'My teeth made them flee in shame.'_

It was not hard to deduce that Apophis' underling had apparently been running away and fallen to his own death, something that made the System Lord in question fume in anger. How dare his underling make him look bad by dying like that!

Yu had lost the eighth, this one defended by a Jaffa garrison of considerable size. There had obviously been a fierce battle as the Jaffa defenders fought against the invaders, but were ultimately defeated. There were several wrecked Udajeet and even one Al'kesh to give silent testimony to their resistance. Several of the Udajeet looked to have been knocked out of the sky with thrown boulders, while the Al'kesh has been cut open like a fish by a long bladed weapon of impossible sharpness.

Next to the wreckage of the Goa'uld bomber, a stone tablet had been left, carrying the philosophical message of _'He who learns but does not think is lost. He who thinks but does not learn is in danger.'_

The ninth planet to be attacked had been under the governance of one of Morrigan's underlings, which was the main reason that her own overlord had sent her to the summit. The underling in question had been found with her head cleanly severed from her body, bisecting the Goa'uld symbiote in the process.

Next to the macabre sight of a severed head with a terrified expression frozen on its face by death, a stone tablet lay with a message saying _'There can be only one!'_.

None of them could make any sense of that one at all. There could be only one what? If such a thing were found next to say...Ra's severed head, one could have assumed that there could be only one Supreme System Lord, but finding it next to the underling of an underling was simply baffling.

The tenth planet to be attacked had once again belonged to Ra and it had once again been undefended. The tablet left behind on this one was another of the ominous type, saying '_Out of the darkness we will rise.'_

The eleventh belonged to Yu and had also been one of the undefended ones. Rather than a philosophical message as had been the case for Yu so far, this one had a series of lewd drawings that clearly represented sexual positions.

That had annoyed Yu a great deal. It was a little known fact that he actually enjoyed philosophy, so he'd found the messages left behind rather enjoyable. Not enough to be worth losing that many slaves over, but enough that it made him angry to have the expected philosophical saying replaced by crude carvings.

The twelth had been Ra's and had taken months to discover the theft of the slaves due to how little it was visisted. Once again not fitting with the apparent peaceful nature of the slave exodus, the ominous message of _'I'm hiding in the dark, my teeth are razor sharp.'_ had been left behind.

The thirteenth and last planet that they knew of to be attack belonged to Bastet. It had held only a moderate force of her Jaffa warrior women, along with a priesthood at her temple. As always, all the people were missing, though this time even the temple cats that were a common fixture at her temples had been taken.

The tablet left behind for her to find bore perhaps the strangest message yet.

_'Dead I am the rat, feast upon the cat._

_Tender is the fur, dying as you purr.'_

The System Lords puzzled over the seemingly nonsensical words, which made little enough sense in English and none at all when translated into Goa'uld. Obviously it was a reference to cats being Bastet's sacred animal, but other then that they were at a loss to interpret it.

These tablets, along with the omnipresent bare footprints, claw marks and the ruined temples(if there were any on the planet) were the only clues they had and they spent a long while arguing over what it might all mean. In the end, the only thing they managed to agree on was that this needed to be stopped.

"But in order to strike back, we need to know the location of their world or at least where they will strike." Camulos said, speaking for the first time.

"True, we know only that they will not strike at heavily defended worlds." Yu agreed.

"That suggests that they do not have the strength to attack anywhere else." Ba'al surmised.

Silence reigned for a while, with everyone knowing that they had far too many worlds where they only exerted influence through the stargate to defend. They simply didn't have the resources to bolster the defences of every planet that could be subject to these mysterious attacks. Even if they completely stopped warring against each other(which simply wasn't going to happen), they would still come up short.

The idea of sending an ashrak assassin against this enemy was also stalled because they didn't actually know who the enemy was.

Prevented from easily exacting their vengeance, the System Lords anger grew and they became all the more determined to retaliate for the insolence of daring to attack them like this. They could not hide forever after all.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

_Galactic North, North-west, Perseus Arm, planet Ratania._

_Throne world of the minor Goa'uld Kuvera._

While the System Lords were trying to puzzle out the connection between disjointed song lyrics from Skillet's _Monster_ and Rob Zombie's _Dragula_, quotes from Confucious and the Highlander movie, lewd carvings and other random bullshit that had been going through his head at the time that those raids had taken place, Naruto was attacking yet another Goa'uld world.

The stargate on Ratania opened with its characteristic outburst of unstable plasma, discharging Naruto with a horde of warriors at his back. It was the middle of the night on Ratania and the Jaffa guards had been half asleep since little ever happened on their planet and were thus easily overcome.

Normally you wouldn't be able to simply gate to a Goa'uld throne world and attack it like this, but Kuvera was a very minor Goa'uld that couldn't just put a shield around the gate to prevent it for various reasons. Those reasons being mostly that he had no Queen of his own and needed to use his Jaffa as a mercenary force to barter for Goa'uld larva to sustain them.

It would be bad for him indeed if someone who sought the services of his Jaffa ended up crushed into molecular paste upon exiting the gate.

"We have secured the perimeter my lord." Te'lok said to Naruto loudly over the sounds of many feet stomping the ground and people efficiently setting up portable barricades made of armor slabs from deconstructed death gliders. They had done this before and practiced it a lot, so it was done quite quickly

He wasn't wearing the Jaffa armor anymore, Naruto having ordered that a lighter, more practical cloth uniform be made for them. It wasn't worth a damn thing as armor, but then again, Jaffa armor wasn't worth a damn thing against Jaffa weapons either. He hadn't liked it at first, but he did have to admit that it was much easier to move without the bulky plate and chain armor and it wasn't as if they were putting down peasant revolts anymore either, against whom the armor _had_ actually been useful.

"Good." Naruto nodded approvingly and surveyed the continued stream of people coming through the gate in orderly lines. "Lets get this invasion started then."

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

_Back on Erius._

Xanna held back a sigh, keeping her eyes on the book in front of her but having trouble focusing on the words.

It was a good book and she'd been enjoying it, especially as it had been a gift from Naruto once he'd cottoned on to the fact that she missed having something to read on this planet full of illiterate peasants. They were learning, but well over half of their population still didn't know how to read and write, the process of educating them being slowed down by the influx of new people with differing cultures every time Naruto went to raid another Goa'uld world. They most certainly weren't going to be producing any good literature for a long while yet, which meant that she was forced to pop back into their previously visited dimension whenever she wanted something to read.

At least, that had been the case until Naruto had taken it upon himself to compile a library for her, full of books that he thought she might find interesting. A bit unnecessary since it wasn't any great harship to find her own books, but undeniably sweet and it did save her a bit of effort.

It was especially sweet since she knew that he had his own problems with living in such a primitive society, having gotten somewhat addicted to the various electronic toys that had been at least half the reason that his quest to get some little sisters had taken so long in the first place.

She'd made him a secret entertainment room for that, furnished with the best computer she could steal, a state of the art sound system and enough songs that he could keep pressing 'next song' on shuffle for at least an hour without getting the same one twice if he were so inclined.

He'd cackled gleefully despite the lack of internet, been very appreciative and called her the best wife ever to have set it up for him even if it had barely taken any effort. So easy to please sometimes.

It was also a good place to retreat when he wanted to get away from the overly amorous attention of the servant girls, a situation that was a source of neverending amusement for her. Naruto couldn't help himself from flirting with them, but he didn't want a harem either, resulting in a truly bizzare reverse harem situation where he tried to stay out of their beds for as long as possible without completely snubbing them.

If he'd just listened to her and kept the servants at a cool distance, treating them well but not too friendly, he wouldn't have this problem. Naturally he couldn't help himself from acting as if they were friends and seducing them almost by accident. It distinctly reminded her of the time when he'd ended up being a favorite riding pony for the majority of the prostitutes in Konoha's red lights district.

Her amusement at Naruto for his inability to stop womanizing was slightly soured at the moment however, because of the situation he'd engineered to get her to talk to Akitsu.

Clearly, he had noticed that there was something on her mind in regards to the Ice Sekirei, but he hadn't pried into it as one might expect and had instead simply waited for her to figure it out. Months had passed and eventually years and she still hadn't figured anything out and now he'd apparently decided that it was time to do so, so he'd gone harring off to a planet that would take a good deal longer than most before everyone was evacuated and resettled on Erius, during which time he'd have to stay on the other side to make sure that things went smoothly.

So here she was, unable to enjoy her book because she knew her husband was going to get progressively more annoying with his ideas if she didn't resolve the distance that had developed between her and Akitsu in this odd threesome of theirs, it was evident even now.

While Xanna was lounging comfortably naked on a nice couch, Akitsu was kneeling on the floor and rubbing her feet, keeping her head down and being quiet as a mouse. In other words, acting as slavishly submissive as she had when they'd first taken her in, more so even.

It didn't take a genius to figure out that she was scared of being discarded but not knowing what she'd done wrong, so she'd just defaulted to the most inoffensive behaviour that she knew of.

Xanna had noted this, but hadn't been able to decide what she wanted to do about the Ice Sekirei that had latched onto them like a particularly affectionate kitten. She hadn't wanted a third party in this relationship, but Naruto was clearly fond of her and not intending to send her away until Akitsu decided to go, which simply wasn't going to happen.

She didn't bother hiding her sigh this time as she put away her book, which instantly made Akitsu tense as if she expected bad news and was bracing herself for it.

"Akitsu?" Xanna asked, bracing her elbow on the nearby armrest and her cheek on her fist to look at the Ice Sekirei lazily.

"Yes mistress?"

Instant response in a completely bland monotone with a hint of fatalism behind it? Yes, definitely preparing herself for expected bad news.

"What do you want to do with your life?"

Confused blink from the Ice Sekirei. Clearly an unexpected question.

"Ah...I wish to stay with you and Naruto." Akitsu answered timidly.

Xanna's lips twitched slightly at the predictable answer. At least Naruto had managed to finally get her to drop the honorifics when she spoke their names, though she did that only rarely.

"Yes, but what do you want to _do_? What activity is there that you enjoy which involves neither me nor Naruto?"

Worrying at her lower lip, Akitsu got the distinct impression that 'whatever you want me to' would have been the wrong answer.

She liked sex, but only with them.

Unlike Xanna, she didn't really like reading because it made her sleepy. Except if she managed to get Naruto to read for her. Some of her fondest memories were of when Naruto would read a book out loud while she and Xanna rested on his chest, though Akitsu had to admit that she paid less attention to his words than she did to the sound of his voice.

Despite her power, she didn't really like fighting and avoided conflict wherever she could. She wouldn't have hesitated to fight and kill if either Naruto or Xanna had ever needed defending, but they didn't and Akitsu found that comforting.

She'd wanted to help them build this empire they were set on creating, but had been forced to abandon that idea. Her avoidance of people who weren't Naruto or Xanna made it impossible to help with that. At the end of the day, she didn't care whether they lived in a palace or a cave in the woods, as long as they were there she would be happy.

Several other activities came to mind, but she generally only liked them because either Naruto or Xanna were involved.

"I don't know." She admitted tremulously after a few minutes of silence, looking as if she was about to cry.

"I will be honest with you Akitsu." Xanna began without much sympathy, knowing that her words would be painful to hear. "You are fun to play with and I enjoy your submissive attitude, but you are too clingy and needy, not to mention rather dull outside the bedroom unless there is someone to play mind games with around."

"I'm sorry." The Ice Sekirei choked out, now openly crying and clearly trying not to wail. She still remembered how annoying the horned woman had found it whenever Kusano had bawled her eyes out for one reason or another and had no wish to irritate her any further.

Xanna sighed again, feeling just the slightest twinge of guilt in the dark recesses of her heart at having reduced Akitsu to tears. She just knew that this ability to feel bad about hurting someone with the truth was Naruto's fault. The truth was what it was and she wouldn't have cared who felt hurt by it before getting involved with him.

Not that her husband generally cared who he hurt with it either, unless it was one of 'his cuties'.

"Come over here." She beckoned gently, patting the empty space on the couch next to her and the Ice Sekirei hastened to obey, laying her head down on Xanna's chest and wrapping her arms around the horned woman's midsection.

"While I had considered it, I will not send you away." Xanna said after Akitsu had gotten the convulsive hitching of her chest under control.

Akitsu sniffled a bit and rubbed her cheek against the soft but firm breast that her head was resting on, sighing contently when she felt the familiar comfort of long, clawed fingers trailing over her scalp.

"I _will_ however, want you to find a hobby for yourself that does not include either me or Naruto."

"Help?" Akitsu asked shyly, feeling braver now that she had a little bit of assurance that she wasn't about to lose everything she held dear.

"Just think, have you ever done anything to pass the time while you were bored that you enjoyed doing?" Xanna asked, fully understanding why something like this might be difficult for the Ice Sekirei. Having been treated more like an object than as a person for pretty much her entire life before Naruto had found her would leave anyone damaged.

Now that it wasn't looking as if her worst nightmare was about to happen anymore, Akitsu could think a bit more clearly and remembered something that she'd overlooked earlier. Unfortunately it was kind of embarrassing.

"You've thought of something." Xanna stated amusedly, feeling Akitsu's face heating up.

The Sekirei silently nodded, face still burning.

"Show me."

Reluctantly, Akitsu extracted herself from the embrace and made for the exit, mumbling a 'be right back.' as she did so.

Several minutes later, She came back with a book that Xanna recognized as the one that Naruto had given her years ago that was meant for taking notes.

Akitsu sat next to the horned woman and twidled her thumbs nervously while Xanna took the book and started leafing through it.

"Akitsu, this is just the self study that Naruto or I assigned you while we were teaching you." Xanna said flatly, somewhat baffled as to what the Ice Sekirei was playing at.

"...The middle." Akitsu said meekly, face still a blazing pink color despite her passive expression.

Giving her another odd look, Xanna nonetheless turned to the middle of the book, seeing yet more homework, this time the slightly higher level math that they'd gotten to by that point. Turning a few more pages finally revealed what had Akitsu so embarrassed.

Intersped between the various quadratic equations were crude drawings of a man and woman with horns, with little hearts floating around them.

Highly amused, Xanna kept turning pages to see what came next. The drawings got better bit by bit, until they were actually fairly well made representations of her and Naruto. The math petered out eventually, to be replaced by the drawings entirely. They also changed from simple doodles into rather kinky sexual positions that one might find in the Kama Sutra, though this one mostly had three people involved rather than two. Many of them Xanna recognized as things they'd already tried in practice.

There were other things aside from visual representations of Akitsu's kink though.

Naruto in the middle of executing a sword stroke, his usual fierce grin firmly in place. Akitsu had given the whole thing a dramatic addition by making it look as if he was cutting the very air.

Herself with ten tails splayed majestically behind her.

Both of them sitting on their throne while a multitude of people bowed to them.

A rather ridiculous one of all three of them holding hands in a cirle, all with silly smiles on their faces.

That and more filled the rest of the book. By the last page, the drawings were starting to look quite well done, though still not something she'd wish to see made public. Akitsu's drawing skills weren't quite doing her justice yet.

"This wouldn't happen to be the reason that you suddenly lost interest in learning math would it?" Xanna asked in amusement after she reached the end.

Akitsu shifted awkwardly before answering in an embarrassed mumble. "Math...boring."

Xanna snorted, agreeing with that assessment wholeheartedly. "So you started doodling out of boredom and then kept at it?"

Akitsu nodded, happy to see that the horned woman wasn't mad at her for it despite the fact that Akitsu had been the one to ask for lessons only to find them dull afterwards.

"But these look to be years old, why did you never continue doing this if you enjoyed it?"

"Ran out of space." The Ice Sekirei answered, face lighting up with color again.

"And it never occured to you to ask for another empty book or perhaps even a canvas?" Xanna asked with an archly raised eyebrow, causing Akitsu to visibly shrink in embarrassment.

"Would have to tell what for." She pouted, Xanna's tone making her feel silly.

"And you were too embarrassed to tell either me or Naruto about this, so you decided to abandon what looks to be an interesting skill instead?" The horned woman continued in the same arch tone before sighing. "Sometimes you can be truly absurd Akitsu, how you can still be embarrassed about some drawings after all the things that Naruto and I have done to you is beyond me."

Akitsu said nothing, only bowed her head and glowed a brilliant pink.

Xanna watched her with silent amusement for a few more seconds before speaking again. "Too bad really, since these are quite good for a beginner."

"They are?" Akitsu asked, perking up a bit at the thought that the horned woman liked her drawings.

"Mhm." Xanna hummed, leafing through the last few pages again. "I dare say that with some more practice you might end up being quite the artist. You are certainly looking to be more talented than either myself or Naruto."

They could both use their powers to create photo realistic imagery, such as what Naruto had done with Bastet's temple several months ago, but trying to draw it by hand was beyond them.

Akitsu blinked in surprise at the last sentence. "Never learned how?"

Akitsu had been certain that Xanna was good at pretty much everything.

Xanna snorted in amusement at the question, remembering _that_ particular scenario. "I tried. I was only about twelve hundred years old at the time and I was certain that I had finally managed to master my foul temper. I was passing through a town one day and beheld some truly beautiful works of art being displayed by a famous painter. Seized by a desire to learn how to create something like it myself, I approached the man and demanded he teach me, only to be refused. I was angered but kept it in check and seduced him into teaching me how to paint like him by promising him pleasure beyond imagining if he did so. He proved surprisingly susceptible to it."

Personally, Akitsu suspected that Xanna was underestimating how good she was at seduction, though the Ice Sekirei was undeniably biased.

"I spent several months learning how to paint but made very little progress and became frustrated by my failure. My teacher had meanwhile become frustrated by the way that I was not living up to my promise."

By this point, Akitsu had a suspicion as to how this arrangement had ended.

"He lost patience first, calling me a talentless harlot and that it was time for me to keep my word and spread my legs, since that was clearly the only thing I was good for."

Xanna paused for dramatic effect, smirking when Akitsu leaned in with interest.

"I tore his head off and the blood spray ruined all of his works in progress. Clearly, my temper was not quite as in control as I'd thought, but at least it was better than that of an overly self important human like him." Xanna finished, sounding satisfied.

Akitsu decided not to point out the discrepancy between a man being angry for being led around by his penis after being lied to and demanding that she do as she'd said she would, and her being insulted by his demand and tearing his head off in retaliation. It was unlikely to serve any purpose.

Besides, that man should have known better.

"Ah..." She finally said, simply for lack of anything else to say. She couldn't find anything appropriate to finish it with though, so she just trailed off into silence.

"But enough about the past, lets see how good you really are." Xanna said when it became obvious that Akitsu was not going to comment on the story.

A canvas shimmered into existence nearby, along with a variety of pencils.

"Would you draw me?" The horned woman asked.

"Now?" Akitsu asked nervously.

"Now is a perfect time." Xanna confirmed. "I'm already naked and posing for you."

The Ice Sekirei was still looking more than a little aprehensive, so Xanna decided to throw in a little more encouragement. "You have nothing to worry about, no one will judge you if it isn't perfect and we will have something to surprise Naruto with once he comes back. I am certain that he will impressed that you can draw."

Nibbling on her lip, Akitsu made her way to the canvas and grabbed one of the pencils. After a minute of indecision, she finally brought it to the paper and began to drag it across. It had been years since she'd done this last, but it came back to her quickly and she began to lose herself in the activity. Having the subject in front of her her instead of needing to work from memory also made it easier.

Back on the couch, Xanna reopened her book and sighed contently at the fact that she could enjoy it again now that there was no tension hanging in the air. She still wasn't sure about keeping Akitsu around for an extended period, but she would settle for having resolved the most immediate problem, namely Akitsu being overly clingy to the point of being irritating. If the girl had a hobby, then it would keep her from hovering around as if she didn't know what to do with herself.

As for keeping her around...well, Akitsu still had quite a few decades in front of her. The answer would surely reveal itself with time, as it always did. Naruto had the right of it this time, there was no point in overthinking it.

Naruto at least would be pleased that the distance between her and Akitsu had shrunk.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

_Hasara Space Station._

"So it is decided." Ra stated imperiously. "We will leave agents on worlds that are likely to be attacked so that they may report back to us who is responsible for this. When they are found, I will go personally to burn their world to ash."

The assembled System Lords nodded their assent, but privately intended to see if this could be used to their own advantage somehow.

Ra and Yu were the only two System Lords present who suspected that this would also result in failure and were already thinking of alternative measures that might be taken. At the moment, their territories were far too spread out for anything else, but this new enemy had proven to be very canny and might well notice their agents before they could report anything of worth.

At least this damnable summit was finally over. Even the highly enjoyable ritual cannibalism of mature Goa'uld was not enough to offset the irritation of dealing with their fellow System Lords.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

_Ratania._

Standing on top of a tall building in what was clearly the more affluent part of the city meant for the Goa'uld and their servants, Naruto grinningly surveyed the action going on around him.

The stargate had been located a short ways off and his invasion force had splintered into multiple squads, each led by the most tactically inclined among them.

Kuvera's Jaffa were quite battle hardened due to being used as a merceneray force by the lesser Goa'uld, but they had been caught flatfooted by the sudden attack, not to mention that Naruto's force was faster, better trained, more flexible in their tactics and were receiving constant reinforcements via the stargate.

There was also the small matter that he'd snatched up every kara kesh hand device and healing device and equipped his Jaffa with them, since they could use them now. There weren't all that many of them, but those things gave a huge tactical advantage to every squad that had one.

They also had the side effect of demoralizing enemy Jaffa, who were convinced that only the gods could use those.

The only real problem had been the Udajeet and Al'kesh that had occasionally showed up, but those were easily taken care of by ripping out chunks of the stone buildings and using them as projectiles. Even the heavy weapon emplacements hadn't proved to be any great obstacle for his highly effective and mobile attack force.

Strangely, the Ha'tak that was parked right on top of what he presumed was Kuvera's palace never got off the ground. He'd almost taken Ratania off the list of possible targets for the next raid because of that thing and now it wasn't even going to attack?

How rude. He'd planned a whole badass flying leap of doom into the bridge(or Pel'tak in Goa'uld) of the ungainly ship, right into the face of the Goa'uld flying it and the cheeky bastard wasn't even intending to get off the ground?

Naruto admired the sheer insolence of it even as he doubted its tactical soundness. He also doubted this particular tactical failure was motivated by insolence.

Ah well, at least standing here and waiting for it to fly had served the purpose of distracting the defenders and making it easier for his mob of invaders to win the day. Considering that it was the dead of night on this planet, the slight glow of his skin and hair made him a veritable beacon in the dark and drew attention like nobody's business. His own people were at least used to it, but the defenders spent dangerous amounts of time gawking at him instead of fighting, which was all to the good.

He could have suppressed the glowing, but he had yet to find a reason for doing that.

"The city is ours Heika, the warriors of the enemy captured or dead and his underlings slain." A female voice in Japanese said to him from below, satisfaction evident in her tone.

Grinning just a bit wider, Naruto jumped down in front of his favorite subordinate so that he wasn't talking down to her quite as much. She was a short-ish woman of Asian descent in her mid twenties, with black hair cut practically short and reaching only as far as her shoulders.

Her people used to live on a world claimed by Izanagi before Naruto had visited and convinced them to come with him.

It had been much easier than most situations where he found himself on a world that the Goa'uld left undefended and only visited occasionally. Despite attempts to convince them of his supposed divinity, they despised Izanagi and stubbornly refused to worship him, clinging to their culture and traditions instead. They'd even managed to preserve their language, though there had been obvious linguistic drift.

Naruto had been delighted to find a people with a culture that clearly had ancient Japanese origins, even if much of it had been lost due to the ban on writing and Goa'uld influence. He'd wasted no time in being his most persuasive when speaking to their leader and convincing him that it really would be in everyones best interests to come with him where they could live in peace and rediscover their culture or whatever they wanted to do.

He'd even offered to teach them how to write Kanji, Katakana, Hiragana and Furigana, which was something long since lost to them thanks to the Goa'uld...or in some cases had never been invented, but that was besides the point.

Despite the standard wariness of his appearance, that wasn't something they'd been willing to pass up and had eventually agreed to relocate to Erius. There may have also been minor amounts of chakra compulsion present in his voice when he'd been persuading them to do this.

"Excellent work Setsuna, and Te'lok should be just about finished with the Jaffa barracks and glider bays too. Were there any civilian casualties?" He asked, noting with some amusement that she was still using a cloth to carefully wipe blood off her katana, blood that was both human red and Goa'uld blue. He had a feeling those underlings had been less 'slain' and more 'executed'.

"Some." She admitted reluctantly, knowing he did not like it when that happened. "For the most part they hid in their homes and were safe, but a few Jaffa thought to take cover there and one of the underlings was cowardly enough to use one as a shield. My subordinates have already carried them to the stargate for healing or resurrection."

"Good, take command of the troops in the lower city and keep anything stupid from happening while I go into the palace." He ordered.

"As you command Tennō Heika." She said almost reverently and made her way back to her squad.

Shaking his head with a grin, Naruto started walking towards the palace, remembering how he'd met the woman.

While initially wary, her people had quickly realized that living under his and Xanna's rule was incomparably preferable to constant raids by Izanagi and his underlings and had felt that they were indebted to him and needed to offer him something more than just their loyalty before honour would be satisfied.

Or at least their leader had felt this way, as he had offered his granddaughter as a concubine for Naruto.

Naruto hadn't wanted a concubine, but the old man had been as stubborn and inisistent as you'd expect from someone whose culture had spent generations silently defying an alien overlord despite the consequences, so he'd rolled his eyes and accepted.

Of course, he'd still had no intention of actually taking the girl as a concubine and would have simply directed her attention somewhere else, depending on what she was like. He'd expected either a starry eyed young girl who thought that she was being given a great honour, or a silently resigned one that felt she had no choice.

What he got was a resentful and downright angry girl in her late teens who had all but spat in his face when they met, clearly infuriated at the thought of being handed over as a sex toy for his pleasure.

Naruto had liked her immediately and asked if she'd like to be trained to fight.

Her grandfather had been scandalized...and so had the Jaffa for that matter, both of which had strenuously objected to teaching a woman how to fight for one reason or another, but Naruto had not been accepting opinions on the matter. He rather hoped that it would encourage more women to ask for combat training eventually, but so far she was the only one.

Setsuna had been ecstatic and thrown herself into the training eagerly, proving driven and skilled enough that he'd eventually given her a command position. The Jaffa that suddenly found themselves under the command of a human woman had grumbled of course, but Setsuna, much to his glee, had smacked them back in line with minimal difficulty.

Just like all of her people, she had a burning hatred for the Goa'uld and took inordinate amounts of pleasure in using the sword he'd gifted to her to execute any that she found. Not too surprising, considering that her parents had been killed during a raid.

The near worshipful devotion she'd developed for him over time was a bit unfortunate and saddening though. He missed the fire breathing little she-demon that she used to be, but he supposed there was no helping it with the way her culture had been and still was. Indeed, her people were among the least problematic to settle on Erius once they realized that he liked their lifestyle and wasn't going to pressure them to change it or demand a tithe of their population as slaves.

He also suspected that she was using that sword(or its hilt at any rate) of hers for more than just killing if his nose didn't deceive him, but what people used as a dildo was none of his business. At least she hadn't turned out like Tia had after he'd played therapist for her. There were quite enough servant girls in the palace already, pouting at him that he didn't pay them private visits often enough. He didn't need that happening in the army as well.

Ah, the perils of being too nice and too sexy.

But now was not the time to be maudlin! Now was the time to find out why the fuck that incompetent Goa'uld that was supposed to be in charge of this planet had denied him the chance to dropkick a space ship.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Tarnor scowled furiously as he stalked through the hallways of the palace, the burn scar on his face from a dangerously close encounter with a blast from a Ma'tok staff bolt making the expression something to behold.

He wasn't even surprised that the demon that he'd heard of from other Jaffa that emptied the worlds of the Goa'uld would strike at them...it was just the way his luck was apparently.

He'd thought that becoming First Prime was an honor and had been eager to serve the great Kuvera as his foremost warrior.

That enthusiasm had dissipated upon the realization that Kuvera was quite incompetent.

Once a Planet Lord in the service of the System Lord Shiva, Kuvera remained independent only because nobody could be quite bothered to conquer him. After Nirrti, at the time a scientist in the service of Shiva, had killed her master in one of the displays of treachery that she was now known for, the dominion of the Goa'uld who had taken the persona of the Hindu gods had splintered. Nirrti took a small dominion for herself, as did Kali and the rest was conquered by others.

The secret of Kuvera's independence resided in the fact that his territory was very close to Nirrti's and she wasn't interested in it, but would poison it beyond recovery with a biological plague of some sort if anyone else conquered it.

And so, Kuvera hobbled on, not good enough to rise in power but not important enough to be wiped out.

According to the tales that his father and grandfather had told him, Kuvera had become progressively less interested in the day to day running of his little empire and Tarnor knew this to be true.

He was the man that had to see his supposed god decline from an incompetent ruler to a useless waste of space. He'd become certain that the man wasn't even a god to be honest. It was hard to believe him to be a god when it was Tarnor that actually made all the decisions, while Kuvera sulked in his quarters and hid away from the world.

Of course, this was not very important at the moment, because they'd been invaded and the enemy's commander was in the palace already.

He'd been woken up from a dead sleep with news that they were under attack, but it was useless. By the time runners had come to inform him of the situation, the enemy had already taken most of the defensive positions and the only thing that might have helped, the Udajeet and Al'kesh, were being knocked out of the sky with thrown chunks of rock of all things.

Kuvera had never taught anyone to fly the Ha'tak, fearing that it would be used against him and he was currently in no position to do it himself, so a critical asset remained grounded while enemy warriors seized it.

Tarnor knew this was the end of the line for him, but at least he would die in battle against a worthy foe, which was the best that he could hope for.

Whatever kind of creature the horned demon was, he was obviously powerful beyond measure and he had already brushed aside the few warriors to have encountered him. Tarnor wasn't sure whether his refusal to kill them was a mercy or an insult.

When he finally found the horned man, he was standing before Kuvera's empty throne and looking contemplatively at the blank stone tablet in his hands.

Tarnor's expression became grim and he gripped his Ma'tok staff tighter. He knew that the next time someone visited Ratania, all they would find was an empty city with only a baffling message carved into that tablet. That was what he'd heard from other Jaffa at least.

"Tell me, if you had the opportunity to say anything you wanted to the System Lords, what would it be?" Naruto asked, not turning around to face the Jaffa pointing a weapon at his back.

Tarnor ignored the question and primed the staff instead, calling out a firm challenge. "I am Tarnor, First Prime to Kuvera. Face me in battle demon!"

Naruto did turn around now, making Tarnor tense further as the slitted eyes that burned like fire settled on him, even though his expression was quizzical rather than hostile.

"Really? You'd call them demons and demand that they fight you? Aren't Jaffa supposed to think that the Goa'uld are gods or something?"

"I have seen enough to know better." Tarnor said grimly. "Now draw your weapon and prepare yourself!"

Naruto ignored the challenge in favor of meeting a Jaffa that had apparently seen through the brainwashing of the Goa'uld. "Why do you still identify as a First Prime to the idiot ruling this planet if you don't believe him to be a god anymore?"

Confused at the lack of hostility, Tarnor lowered the staff a marginal amount as he answered. "For my fellow Jaffa. As long as I remain First Prime here, I can keep them from being absorbed into the armies of another Goa'uld."

Intrigued both by the answer and his lack of reaction to the insult leveled at Kuvera, Naruto decided that he wanted this particular Jaffa to switch sides. "Why not come with me then? I can cure you of your dependence on the symbiotes and nobody has to fight for me if they don't want to."

"I have heard of you demon." Tarnor answered grimly, putting the claim of being able to heal them of their symbiote dependence to the back of his mind for now. "You attack worlds and leave them empty of people, what assurance do I have that those who go with you do not meet their end on your dinner table?"

Tarnor was used to the Goa'uld tendency to be easily offended by even the smallest slight, so having the enormous and clearly dangerous horned man explode into laughter at his question left him quite nonplussed.

"Is that really what they think of me?" Naruto asked with a final snigger after a few seconds.

"The tales vary," Tarnor said slowly. "but it is generally accepted that the people whose worlds you attack meet some unfortunate fate."

Something that the First Prime was beginning to strongly doubt.

"That's hilarious, but not even close to being true." Naruto replied. "So, would you like to come with me or not?"

"You would leave us be if we refused?" The Jaffa asked in shock.

"I'd be disappointed, but yes." Naruto admitted.

"Then why did you even attack?" Tarnor asked in confusion.

"My wife and I are building and empire and we started out with a very small amount of people. Aside from their petty cruelty, the Goa'uld are clearly incompetent as rulers so we've taken to stealing away their people."

"And suborning their warriors." The Jaffa added as a flat statement.

"But of course." The horned man admitted proudly. "It is after all the pinnacle of a military victory to capture the assets of an enemy intact rather than outright destroy them."

Tarnor had no choice but to agree with that rather sensible logic, at the same time recalling that most of the Goa'uld were more likely to obliterate the opposition entirely as a warning about resisting them. It would also explain why the majority of the man's warriors favored the zat'nik'tel rather than a staff weapon.

"So how about it? Will you **join me** or would you like to stay here." Naruto continued, putting a little bit of a compulsion into two particular words to help sway Tarnor's decision. He didn't even feel bad about it because honestly, Tarnor was not equipped to make an informed decision at this point in time.

Thinking quickly, the Jaffa considered the offer. If he accepted, then he would be going into the unknown with an unknown quantity, even if what he'd seen so far had been much better than the Goa'uld.

On the other hand, the alternative was to go into seclusion and be forced to raid Goa'uld held worlds when the current batch of symbiotes started maturing, or approach another Goa'uld and ask to enter their service. Also a problem since Jaffa that needed to act as mercenaries were looked down upon by those in service to a stronger Goa'uld.

The first option seemed a lot more appealing.

"The others may not follow you for as long as Kuvera lives, but if you kill him, they will be unlikely to protest." He said, tacitly agreeing to go with the horned man.

"A problem easily solved." Naruto said with a grin. "Where is the lazy worm?"

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

"What's wrong with him?" Naruto asked, scratching his head as he looked at the Goa'uld that was supposed to be in charge of this planet.

Kuvera's host was a man of Hindu descent that would have been quite handsome if not for his current state. Sprawled on top of a pile of cushions, his clothes rumpled and hair askew. There was even a line of drool hanging out of his mouth.

"He has overindulged in concentrated kassa extract again." Tarnor said blandly, signifying that this was clearly a frequent occurrence.

"And kassa is...?" Naruto prompted, picking up a nearby chalice(gold of course, what else would the Goa'uld use?) and sniffing dubiously at the contents.

"A plant whose juices cause euphoria but slow the mind when ingested. A Jaffa or Goa'uld can withstand its addictive properties, but it swiftly makes humans slaves to their desire for it after a single bite." Tarnor explained. "The Goa'uld sometimes use it to deal with troublesome human civilizations, but not often as it tends to make them useless as slaves."

"I take it that not even a Goa'uld can resist the effects of the concentrated variety." The horned man asked dryly.

"So it would seem. He has been like this for years, only waking from his stupor long enough to stumble into a sarcophagus, eat or relieve himself." Tarnor confirmed. "Sometimes not even that."

"Conveniently leaving you to execute orders 'in his name' as long as his underlings didn't find out that their master was...indisposed." Naruto guessed with amused irony.

"As long as he made the occasional appearance, they wrote off his reclusiveness as caution and his underlings had neither the wit nor ambition to discern the truth."

"No wonder you couldn't think of him as a god anymore, his brain is practically dribbling out of his ears." Naruto muttered after a moment of silence.

Tarnor made no comment on that, though his scarred face did twitch into a brief smile at the mental image.

Moving closer to the unconscious Goa'uld, Naruto placed his hand on the back of the man's neck and phased the symbiote out of him without causing any damage to the host. Unsurprisingly, without the healing ability of the symbiote, the host's body quickly shut down from the massive quantity of powerful narcotics in his system.

"Oh yeah, he is so out of it." Naruto stated, flapping the serpentine creature around like a length of rope and getting only a minimal reaction out of it. Usually a Goa'uld treated like that would be writhing all over the place and screeching at the indignity of it.

Tarnor flinched slightly as the symbiote was tossed uncaringly into a nearby fireplace, something that _did_ finally break it out of the kassa induced haze.

"Now lets go and address the people."

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

In the ten Earth years(Naruto still wasn't entirely sure how long a local year on Erius was) that had passed since that first raid on Saral, Erius had grown considerably. Aside from the first settlement, numerous villages were popping up as the people sought out new places to live.

The constant influx of people made it somewhat difficult to keep up the education to a level that Naruto and Xanna had been hoping for, especially in the more distant villages due to lack of a communication infrastructure, but things were hobbling along somehow.

They knew that it would be handled eventually, but for now it was more important to increase the population base. At the very least, a rudimentary system for handling the refugee influx had been established so that it wasn't quite as chaotic as it had been the first time and there were now more people than just him and Xanna handling the organizational part.

Ratania, being a throne world, had a substantially larger human population than the ones he'd been raiding so far, presenting a bit of a problem for relocating so many. Fortunately, it was also mostly ignored by other Goa'uld, so Naruto could afford to take his time.

He couldn't just march the people through the gate either, as this amount of people being forced to a new world might end in some rebellious behavior from them, which would be annoying.

So Naruto had called an assembly to talk to them and persuade them to go with him willingly.

There was a lot of muttering as his horned self appeared on the palace balcony and even a short scream that was quickly cut off.

"People of Ratania!" He began, his voice booming over the entire city and easily being heard by everyone. "**Kuvera is dead and you are free of his oppression**. If you wish, you may stay here and live as you see fit, but know that eventually** another like him will come, seeking to rule you again.** I offer you an alternative, **come with me** through the stargate and make a new life for yourselves on my world. I rule there, alongside my wife and **we will protect you**. For now, go home, speak to your loved ones, sleep on it and decide in the morning whether you wish to **come with me **or stay here. Thank you for your time."

With that final sentence, he gave a short wave to the silent mass of people and retreated back inside the palace, out of sight before a grin made its way to his face.

"An impressive speech, if only you had not laced it with so many vocal compulsions that there is little doubt as to the outcome." A familiar female voice spoke reproachfully.

Grin widening, he turned to his visitor, spreading his arms as if she were an old friend and he expected her to leap into his arms for a hug.

"Oma baby! So nice to see you again!"

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

**Damn, finally done. I didn't have a lot of time off lately and it's been annoying trying to write and this chapter just felt wrong so I had to keep rewriting sections of it. It still doesn't feel quite right...too much of an info dump at places, but it was fairly unavoidable and I just wanted to get it over with already.**

**A bit of a cliff hanger, but the next chapter is almost certainly going to be out faster than this one. I hope you enjoyed it despite the info dumping.**

**Until next time.**


	5. Chapter 5

**I would like to thank everyone who continues to follow this story and an extra special thanks to those of you who leave extra long reviews.**

**I love those.**

**I hope you enjoy this latest chapter :P.**

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

_"Oma baby! So nice to see you again!"_

Despite his exuberant greeting, Oma Desala did not rush into Naruto's arms as if he was a long lost friend, instead simply gazing at him with a neutral expression.

"So..." Naruto began and lowered his arms when it became obvious that he wasn't getting a hug or a response. "How've you been? Has anyone licked your ectoplasmic nipples lately?"

Resisting the urge to sigh and reminding herself that this was only to be expected from him, she answered with the characteristic calm of the Ascended. "I have been well."

"Clearly you haven't if there wasn't any ghost sex." Naruto refuted with a sad sigh for her. Immortality without sex was just plain depressing.

"I am not a ghost Naruto."

"I must disagree." He argued back. "You ascended at the moment of death, converting your body mass into pure energy, allowing your spirit to exist consciously in a non-corporeal state. That is more or less the definition of a ghost, making me technically correct, which is the best kind of correct."

"Is a ghost not incapable of affecting the physical world?" She asked pointedly despite her disinterest in playing these games with him.

In the ten cycles of Terra since she'd last spoken with him, Oma had come to the conclusion that trying to get directly to the point with him was apparently something that he saw as a challenge and would purposefully clog the conversation with sexual innuendo and digression.

She could only wish that she could speak to him in the same manner as she spoke to the occasional mortal that found one of her sanctuaries and began walking the path towards ascension, but that was just wishful thinking. Naruto wasn't interested in learning anything from her and would likely have little tolerance for metaphor.

"Obviously not since you can do it." He countered with indisputable circular logic. By the grin on his face, he no doubt knew that he was not being very persuasive and simply didn't care. "But this is no way to have a conversation! Both of us should be in the same state of matter for a proper one."

Wary of being forced into corporeality again, Oma tried to shift things in her favor. "Will you then discard the flesh and allow me to see the light of your soul?"

Naruto gave her an aghast expression and spoke in a tone of incredulity. "Woman, are you crazy? I did not spend years of my life sculpting this body to perfection only to abandon it now."

Before any counter argument could be made to the effect of him being able to rebuild it instantly at any time, of her existing as a non-corporeal form for millenia, or of the greater ease of conversation between two spirits, Oma experienced the familiar vertigo of being forced into a physical body.

A wolf whistle brought her attention back to him and she straightened up from where she'd been leaning on a nearby wall. While the meaning of the whistle escaped her, the leer as he looked her over did not.

Apparently she was back in her younger form, though it felt as if her breasts were somewhat larger than before, not to mention that there was a musculature to the body that spoke of dedication to physical exercise that she had never had. She barely remembered what her real body had felt like, but she knew that it hadn't been anywhere near this strong.

Perhaps the most glaring change from the appearance she took as an ascended being were the clothes she now wore. Instead of the modest white dress she was now wearing a sleeveless, skintight black vest that left her stomach bare and exposed far too much of her breasts to be comfortable. Aside from that insufficient article of clothing she only wore a matching pair of skintight black pants made of the same soft and rather comfortable material.

Oma felt terribly exposed with the way that his eyes roved over her barely covered body. Alteran society had favored lighter colored clothing that was not so blatantly sexualized. While they had mostly rid themselves of shame of the body, most chose not to expose themselves like this, nor were the Alteran people prone to leering appraisals of others. In short, this was the exact opposite of Oma's comfort zone and she would have likely felt less exposed naked.

"You clean up nice." He complimented, leer never leaving his face. "Do a little spin for me so that I can see if I got your ass right."

Brows lowering in a slight glare, Oma had to struggle keep her arms at her sides instead of using them to cover herself from his stare. Needless to say, she did not do a little spin for him.

Undaunted by her refusal, Naruto ploughed on relentlessly. "How do you like the leather pants and vest? I put a lot of thought into making those for you."

"These are made of leather?" Oma asked with her face going a bit pale.

"Yep, 100% processed animal skin." He confirmed with a smirk.

Oma felt a shiver of revulsion crawl up her spine at the thought that she had actually enjoyed the feel of the clothing if not their appearance. The Alteran civilization had stopped using animal hide as a raw material for clothing a long, _long_ time before her birth, deeming it to be cruel, wasteful and unnecessary. The same went for food produced through the exploitation of animals. Aside from all else, even simple economics had made certain that such practices had been abandoned. With the technology at their command, the resources required to feed a single person with an animal's flesh would be able to feed at least a hundred people at the most pessimistic minimum. There had been a powerful stigma against it to the very end, so her revulsion was instinctive.

"Well I suppose that's not entirely true since no animals were flayed to make it." Naruto continued thoughtfully, as if he didn't notice Oma's distress. "I wonder if PETA would object to me making authentic leather and fur clothing if there are no animals involved?"

Already developing a headache from the constant bouts of randomness, Oma couldn't stop herself from asking something that she suspected she would regret. "What is PETA?"

"There were naked women involved, I'm sure you can draw your own conclusions." He replied airily.

Confused as to what connection naked women had with leather and fur clothing, Oma abandoned that line of inquiry before the horned man could make things any more unclear.

Giving a miniscule pout as his guest once again went silent, Naruto prowled around her in a predatory manner, put his hands on her hips and purred into her ear from behind. "Since you've decided to visit me again, and dressed so provocatively might I add, I'm going to assume you..._want_...something."

There was no restraining the sigh this time as she visibly held herself back from pointing out that it hadn't been her that had decided to dress like this. Nor did she give any outward hint as to how much the uninvited intrusion into her personal space bothered her. She'd come here fully expecting it to happen after all. "That is most certainly not what I am here for."

"And what if I..." He paused and pulled her against his chest, drawing a small gasp of surprise from her at suddenly having a naked chest pressed up against her barely covered back. "Don't give you a choice in the matter?"

"You will not do so." Oma said as firmly as she could, though there was still a slight tremble in her voice. It took all of the self-control she possessed to keep herself still instead of jerking away from him. It didn't help that the traitorous physical body he'd put her in was actually enjoying the way his forearm was holding her and the heat of his body against her back.

"Are you sure about that?" He purred into her ear again in a low rumble that caused gooseflesh to prickle across her body.

_Not entirely._ "Yes."

He didn't reply verbally this time, choosing instead to drag his teeth across the curve of an ear and sniffing at her hair almost curiously.

Oma simply closed her eyes and endured it silently, clenching her fists tightly the entire time. She had thought that something like this might happen, but she had underestimated how difficult it would be. The urge to bolt like a frightened deer was expected, but the slowly growing arousal was not. She had thought herself beyond such things, but was discovering that this self-assessment may have been in error and her lack of familiarity with having a physical body was only exacerbarating the situation rather than helping.

The seconds ticked by agonizingly slowly as he stayed pressed against her back, ocassionally giving her ears a lick or nibble, or dragging his hand across her hips and abdomen. Oma stayed stiff and tense the entire time, refusing to relax even as the arousal became as strong as the fear.

Much to her relief, he stayed away from her breasts and genitals. She wasn't entirely certain what would happen if his hands strayed there, but she didn't want to find out.

Ten years spent thinking and occasionally observing(from a safe distance), trying to understand him had led to this and she would not be sidetracked or frightened away again. The other Ascended feared Naruto and Xanna's greater power and had decided to stay away from them, but she was not willing to waste this opportunity to remedy the mistakes of the past. Oh they wouldn't say they were afraid, claiming that 'the Outsiders existed on a different level and were exempt from the law of non-interference', but she knew that they were simply unwilling to provoke the wrath of someone who may well have power enough to end their existence.

So here she was, enduring what most definitely counted as sexual harrassment because she was unwilling to fall in line with their decision. More than one of them had none too subtly tried to convince her to leave it be, but were in the end restrained by their own reluctance to go against their self-imposed laws. Speaking to a higher being that already knew of them wasn't in violation of the law of non-intereference after all. She'd done worse in the past.

The only problem was Naruto himself, because he made no sense and that which made no sense couldn't be influenced.

She had finally felt that she had a reasonably good assessment of his personality and had decided to appear now that he was on a different planet from his even more unpredictable wife. Naruto at least gave her something to think about, while Xanna kept too much hidden within.

The trick to Naruto seemed to be that he displayed several traits of a powerful predator, such as 'playing with his food'(for lack of a better term) when something or someone caught his interest.

The current situation being a fine example. He'd figured out or guessed that she was uncomfortable with his blatant sexual advances, so he continued with them until she fled, such as last time. Oddly enough he only displayed this tendency of predatory playfulness with women who were both old enough and willful enough, both categories that Oma apparently fit into.

Which was why she was merely staying silent and letting him do what he wanted in the hope that her lack of response would cause him to lose interest. She had seen that he had only minimal interest for women that threw themselves at him and he had certainly never forced himself on one as far as she could tell, so she'd felt that it was safe enough to do this.

Of course, there was a slight chance that she'd badly misjudged him and would up raped, but she'd been _almost_ certain that that wouldn't happen.

That much at least she had been correct about, but she hadn't accounted for the possibility that he might actually be able to get her aroused. A foolish oversight, but nothing to be done about it now.

"Well somebody came here with a plan." He purred to her and stepped back, snapping Oma out of her thoughts.

She cringed internally at the interested note in his tone. She just knew that she could now look forward to more of the same whenever she was in a physical body around him. He was definitely far too much like one of the great cats that now lived on Terra.

It wouldn't be an issue if he just let her stay in an ascended state, but there was little hope of that. He clearly reveled in his physical senses and didn't like the fact that he couldn't smell or touch her.

"Have you been reading my mind again?" She asked with a frown, still feeling intensely disapproving of how casually he violated the privacy of people's thoughts.

"Didn't need to." He said with a wide grin. "You're both scared and turned on, but you didn't try to run or encourage me to do more despite your wet snatch and out of control heartbeat. You're actually breathing hard and shaking with the effort of staying still, so you're clearly up to something."

Oma felt the long forgotten and much disliked feeling of blood rushing to her already flushed face at his accurate assessment. "Must you be so crude?"

"Must you be so prude?" He tossed back mockingly, tossing himself into a comfortable armchair that had just now appeared.

"Have a seat." He offered as another one appeared for her.

Oma almost released a sigh of relief as she sat down, the shaking that afflicted her disobedient physical legs having made it uncomfortable to stand. The earlier arousal still lingered and made her entirely too aware of her rather exposed state of dress, but it wasn't so bad as to be hard to control.

"Tea?" He asked with a smirk, materializing a familiar tea set and pouring it into a cup for her and dumping the rest into an incongruous tankard for himself.

With a suspicious look at him, Oma took the cup and brought it to her mouth, surreptitiously sticking her tongue into it to test the temperature, remembering what had happened the last time. It was a much more reasonable temperature this time and she drank some of it, finding the flavor to be quite enjoyable.

Naruto grinned both at her caution and at the pleased little sigh she let out as the tea made it's way down her throat. The Ascended could yammer on about the benefits of leaving behind their physical bodies all they wanted, but he'd never believe that they didn't miss all the little pleasures they gave up by doing so.

"If I were to force myself on you right now, would it be rape or masturbation?" Naruto asked out of nowhere. "You know, since I was the one who created that body, which means that it technically belongs to me."

Oma looked at him very strangely and slowly put down her tea cup. Remarkably enough it had helped soothe her jangled nerves from earlier and the sexual charge in the air had dissipated in the more casual atmosphere. Despite the content of the question, he didn't sound at all threatening but rather curious.

"I would say that it would be rape, since I am the one occupying it." She answered cautiously, finding the philosophical tone of the discussion to be incredibly strange given what it was about.

"I suppose that you are _technically _correct." Naruto agreed with a smirk and brought the tankard of tea to his lips.

Lips twitching into a slight smile at what was now an obvious attempt to bring some humor to the situation, bizzare though it was. Deciding to go along with it she responded with his own words from earlier, even if she didn't agree with them. "Which is the best kind of correct?"

Naruto raised his tankard to her as if in toast and nodded with a broad grin.

"So what do you want?" He asked after another moment of silence.

Oma almost felt like slumping in relief that he was finally letting her get to the point. Both her and Ganos' encounters with Naruto had made it clear that immediatelly attempting to get to the purpose of her visit was doomed to end in ignoble failure.

"I was hoping to come to an arrangement with you." She said vaguely.

"I'm going to take a wild guess that you're not looking for a friend with benefits?" Naruto asked dryly.

"Friend with benefits?" Oma asked in confusion, the term being unfamiliar to her.

"You know..._benefits._" He leered.

Oma sighed at how he had once again navigated the conversation into the filth. "Does everything revolve around the act of fornication to you?"

"Everything, and I mean _everything_, is just a big dirty joke when you get down to it." Naruto asserted with authority. "Maybe you'll understand that when you reach a higher level of enlightenment."

She did not react to the backhanded insult, knowing by now that he was just doing it to get a rise out of her. Instead she pressed onward with her purpose. "The arrangement that I wished to reach with you would be thus; I would help you in the creation of your empire and in return you would speak to me about the nature of the Universe that is hidden from the Ascended. You may not have as much raw knowledge as us due to your youth, but I suspect that you can perceive far more than we do."

Oma ignored the nervous fluttering in her stomach as he didn't answer for a solid minute, instead simply staring at her unblinkingly with that predatory gaze. He was clearly considering something and the abyssal darkness in the slits of his eyes made her feel so very small and insignificant. The tension kept building until she broke out in a cold sweat for reasons that she couldn't even name.

Naruto paid no heed to her rising discomfort as he considered her proposal. He didn't for a second believe that what she said was the whole of it. He'd been deliberately creepy earlier and she wouldn't have put up with it if all she wanted was access to more knowledge. He knew what buttons to push in a woman's body to get her aroused even if she wasn't particularly interested and he knew that Oma most definitely was not interested. It should have driven her away even more effectively than her fear, but she'd stayed without so much as a word of protest to what he was doing.

She was obviously up to something.

It wasn't really hard to figure out what it was either. The Ascended had no motivations at all on the physical plane besides keeping their noses out of everything and enforcing their no interference law, which they had already tried and failed to do with him and Xanna. Oma was something of a maverick in the sense that she didn't entirely agree with their no interference policy. She didn't want to meddle with mortals, but felt that they should at least take care of the mess they left behind.

Offering to help with the creation of their empire in any capacity ran contrary to those beliefs and she wouldn't have proposed such a thing unless it would gain her something that she wanted. Considering how empty the lives(if they could even be called that) of ascended beings seemed to be, there wasn't a whole lot that she could possibly want.

She was trying to manipulate him. It was so cute!

Finally the silence was broken when he gave her another broad grin and spoke in a deeply amused voice. "Are you playing games with me Oma?"

Oma stiffened and responded just as stiffly. "My proposal is genuine."

"No doubt, but you didn't mention your primary objective." He pointed out gleefully. "You knew that you couldn't stop us from building this empire of ours, so you thought to use this arrangement to manipulate its growth into something more to your liking. I'm also thinking that you saw how helpful I tend to be to people that I like and were hoping to strike up a friendship with me so that I would want to get rid of Anubis for you. How marvelously underhanded of you! I honestly hadn't thought that any of you sulky poodles had it in you to try something like this."

Oma had gone pale as she'd heard all of her plans exposed before they'd even gotten started. While there was no plot to usurp their empire, she _had_ hoped to influence its growth in a more positive direction. She hadn't expected to keep it secret for long, but by then Naruto would have hopefully seen that it benefited him to keep her around. Her hope that he would eventually do away with Anubis for her was spot on though. "H-how? Did you-"

"No, I didn't read you mind," He cut her off with an eyeroll. Honestly, did she really think that he went around reading everyones mind? He needed to stop telling people that he could do that. "that would be boring. You're just predictable."

Though he had plucked the memory of her interaction with Anubis out of her head.

Oma was starting to get irritated despite her resolve to stay calm but nonetheless replied without rancor, though her voice was a touch colder than before. "And what will you do now that you know Emperor?"

"Firstly, I am going to salute you for even trying something rather than sulking in your own little corner of the astral plane like the other ninnies you share it with."

He did as he said he would, giving her a thumbs up and a cheesy smile that wouldn't have been out of place on the face of Maito Gai or Rock Lee.

"Secondly, I am going to offer you a mango."

Oma blinked as he reached into the air next to him and pulled a fist sized red-yellow fruit out of it, offering it to her. Robotically she took it and stared at it, frowning in further confusion as her stomach gurgled demandingly at the sight of it. It took her a few seconds to classify the feeling as hunger, having long forgotten what it felt like.

Under Naruto's expectant gaze, she hesitatingly took a bite of it, wary of another prank like the one with the tea he'd pulled at their first meeting.

She had not been at all prepared for the sweet, juicy flavor that exploded in her mouth and she very quickly found herself taking larger bites of the perfectly ripened fruit that was just firm enough to offer some resistance to her teeth.

Naruto looked on in bemusement, munching on his own mango, as a woman that hadn't eaten in well over ten thousand years more or less devoured the fruit. She was clearly trying to eat with some decorum but appeared to be having some trouble. He'd guessed that she would have a more extreme reaction than most to the tastier-than-normal fruit that Xanna had been fiddling around with, but he hadn't expected it to be quite this bad.

Genetically engineering the perfect fruit had become something of a hobby for his wife.

He handed the embarrassed looking woman a napkin to wipe her mouth once she was done, clearly able to see that she was restraining herself from asking for another.

"Was that a pocket dimension?" She asked instead, running her tongue across her teeth to keep the taste of the delicious fruit on it for as long as possible.

"Interdimensional Storage Locker." Naruto corrected. "Xanna and I keep our stuff in there."

"What can it hold? And what is its capacity? How is it sustained?" Oma asked, curiosity getting the best of her.

"It can hold anything, its capacity is infinite and it is sustained by our will." He answered with a smirk. "But don't trouble yourself with this astonishing achievement, because thirdly, I am willing to accept your proposal."

"You are?" She asked in surprise, having been certain that it would be rejected out of hand once her intention had been exposed.

She really would have wanted to know more about this 'Interdimensional Storage Locker' as he called it. It sounded suspiciously like a empty miniature universe they'd created for the sole purpose of keeping their things in, a use so incredibly frivolous for such a thing that she had trouble understanding it. Unfortunately, Naruto did not look willing to share any further information on it.

"Your attempt to manipulate me is adorable and I'm curious to see how exactly you plan to go about it." He informed her with a smirk.

Oma frowned slightly at his tone, feeling that there was something there that he wasn't telling her but unable to discern what it might be. The frown deepened considerably at his next words.

"I'm also very amused by your selfishness concerning the Anubis situation."

"Selfishness? I tried to help him, thinking that he had seen the error of his ways during his exile. He was dying and seemed sincere in his remorse for his past deeds."

"I'm not talking about that, that was just you being gullible and stupid." He said without concern for the way that her face tightened at the insult. "I was talking about how much of a spineless coward you are to try and get me to clean up your mess for you while Anubis uses his half-ascended state to seek out knowledge that will let him overthrow the other Goa'uld."

That stung her in a way that no casual insult could, because it had the truth behind it.

Still, it wasn't something that she liked to think about and the physical body she was occupying reacted to unwelcome stimuli in a predictable fashion. It felt a threat and released a flood of hormones in preparation for a fight.

Surging to her feet, she snapped angrily at the grinning horned man, his clear amusement at her reaction only fueling her anger. "All this subterfuge would not even be necessary if the others had simply descended him all the way instead of trapping him in between as a means of punishing me!"

"Very true, those heartless bastards." He agreed, grinning even wider at seeing how she was shaking with the force of her anger. Whatever Oma had been before her ascension, a fighter it was not. Too frazzled by her anger for that, though he supposed she might have simply forgotten how to control herself, but he suspected that his first guess was the correct one. "Why, just think of all the innocent lives that cloud of oily vapor has destroyed since then, all of which could have been prevented if they just descended him all the way and killed him."

Confused by his seeming turnaroud, Oma simmered down a bit and did not reply, while Naruto blithely continued speaking.

"What do you think the Ori would have done in the same situation?"

"They would have descended him completely and had him killed." She admitted reluctantly. Their fanatically religious counterparts would never have tolerated the Goa'uld on sheer principle, much less a Goa'uld that had managed to ascend.

The Ascended did not like to think about the other faction of their race to have reached ascension and she was no exception to this. Their entire home galaxy was under Ori control, being slowly but surely populated by humans created by the Ori to fuel their power with worship. The Ascended refused to act against them aside from preventing direct actions, fearing that a war between their two factions would be disastrous. The Ori of course had no such concerns, refraining from starting a war only because the odds were against them for the moment, so they were content to gather power until that changed.

Moros, or Merlin as he came to be known later had known this and descended himself with the intent of finding a way to destroy them that way. From what she knew he had nearly succeeded before Ganos had stopped him.

Oma had the distinct feeling that stopping Moros from executing his plans would prove to be a bad decision sometime in the future.

"What an amusing example of evil doing good." Naruto sniggered.

"They would have only done so because they want everyone to worship them as gods and would tolerate none to challenge this."

Naruto simply shrugged at her response. Their reasons were irrelevant and they _did_ technically qualify as gods, as did the ascended. Pointing that out to Oma would probably be unwelcome though.

Best save that for some other day when he was running low on other material to annoy her with.

For now, he decided to let go of the subject of Oma's refusal to take Anubis out of the equation herself, not wanting to actually guilt trip her into doing it. He had a pretty good idea why she didn't want to do that and it was certainly understandable, staying locked in combat with the half ascended Goa'uld for all eternity sounded like a shitty existence to him too.

"Have you ever wondered why you're always so irritable when I put you into a physical body?" He asked instead, forcefully changing the subject.

Taking a moment to regain her composture, Oma answered him calmly, glad for the subject change. "Because you make it your mission to be irritating?"

"True, but not the whole truth." Naruto told her with a grin. "It's also because that body is about a day away from starting its menstrual cycle."

In short, he'd given her PMS.

"You were using this body's hormonal imbalance to manipulate my emotions?" Oma asked, feeling the anger rising again. That would certainly explain why her breasts ached in the uncomfortably tight vest and why her abdominal area felt bloated.

"I was using it to make it easier." He corrected, not at all phased by her anger.

Taking a deep breath, Oma decided that she'd had quite enough of the horned man for one day...possibly enough for a few years.

"I believe I would like to leave now, the slow way this time."

"No sexy time?" He pouted at her. "There's another mango in it for you."

The only response was a downright angry scowl that he hadn't expected to see on her face quite yet. In some ways it was even better than if she had agreed to sleep with him.

Chuckling at the look, he disconnected her from the body and watched her fly away with a grin as it collapsed like the unguided puppet it was. A moment later it disintegrated into nothing, leaving behind no evidence that Oma had ever been here.

"Ah Oma," He sighed to himself fondly. "you're playing a dangerous game here. I love dangerous games."

He strongly suspected that aside from the previously mentioned reasons, Oma was also going to try and influence him to be a more ethical person. Something that was doomed to failure from the start. Even if he had been inclined to change, Xanna would never have stood for it. She didn't have a lot of tolerance for people with too many morals.

But at least the whole thing had provided him with some inspiration for what to put on the obligatory stone tablet! With a wide, anticipatory grin at what the future would bring, he started carving into the tablet with his claw.

_As you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you._

Nietzsche would be so proud that one of his most famous sayings was being used in outer space, or maybe he'd be mad...it was hard to say for certain. Of course, Nietzsche technically hadn't been born yet and word of Naruto's quote theft was extremely unlikely to ever reach him so it was all academic.

The point was that Oma wasn't the only one who could play that sort of game, except he'd be doing it in reverse.

Naruto idly wondered what Oma would be like as a hedonistic sexual deviant. He would enjoy finding out, provided he could corrupt her enough of course.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

The evacuation of Ratania proceeded without issue from that point on, it's population of approximately seventy thousand moving to Erius over the course of fifteen local days. For a Throne World, it was a tiny population, but Ratania was only called a throne world because Kuvera was technically independent and it was the only planet to his name.

There was unfortunately no way to get Kuvera's Ha'tak back to Erius undetected, seeing as it was on the other side of the Galactic Core and would need to cross the territory of several System Lords. Not to mention how long it would take to traverse that distance. In lieu of bringing it back, he'd blown it up with one of those silly spherical bombs that the Goa'uld used. Seriously, spherical bombs?

Sometimes, Naruto wondered whether the snakes got their inspiration from cartoons. It would almost make sense, if not for the fact that cartoons also technically hadn't been invented yet, at least not on Earth in this particular time.

Ah well, he already had the one Ha'tak from Zeus anyway and they were all pretty much the same. The fireworks at least seemed to have impressed Kuvera's former subjects and made moving them to Erius a little bit easier.

It was the largest population they had ever tried to move by a considerable margin, but it all went smoothly enough. Temporary housing was built for them while work was done on something more permanent.

There were still logistical issues to be dealt with of course, but there was a system in place by now. A somewhat crude system admittedly, but a system nonetheless. They'd be fine, it would just be more work than usual after one of these raids.

All of that could wait however, at the moment he was a lot more interested in seeing his wife again. This was the longest time that he'd ever been separated from her since they'd gotten married and he missed her. Sure, they could talk to each other no matter the distance, but it just wasn't the same.

So it was that Naruto found himself marching at a fast clip through the palace towards his wife. He'd have been running but she'd already given him a lecture about how Emperors do not run, they stride majestically and he had no desire for a repeat of that particular experience. Don't even get him started on the teleport ban and the need to be seen.

Regardless of Naruto's disgruntlement with the limitations his wife had placed on his means of travel from point A to point B, he still broke into a happy grin when he saw her sitting on her half of the Obsidian Throne(a name for it that he rather liked), apparently settling a dispute of some sort and looking spectacularly unimpressed by the two shepherds fidgeting nervously beneath her flat stare.

He couldn't blame her, he'd be unimpressed too if someone had come to him to settle a dispute over sheep. Alas, sheep tended to be quite important in primitive societies, especially ones as small as theirs currently was.

Her look shifted over to him with a smile of welcome, the type of happy smile she only ever gave to him. It softened the arrogant perfection of her face considerably and the two fidgeting peasants stared dumbfounded as the forbidding Empress became a woman that was happy to see her husband had returned for a few moments.

The moment passed when Naruto didn't stop his quick march towards her, making her expression shift into one of warning.

A warning that was pointedly ignored as he pulled her off the throne and into a kiss. No doubt he was going to be the target of some scathing barbs and exasperated looks for yet again ignoring her warnings about over effusive public displays of affection diminishing their authoritative presence or something to that effect, but he wasn't going to be moved on this one.

Returning his smouldering look with one of her own, Xanna spoke to the two uncomfortable shepherds without turning to look at them. "We will settle this tomorrow, you may make use of the guest rooms and baths for the night. Ask one of the servants to direct you."

Naruto didn't even wait for the two guests to say their thanks before he started leading his wife away from the throne room, his hand already sliding over the curve of her buttocks. She must have missed him as much as he'd missed her if she wasn't going to bother giving even a token reprimand to his form of greeting.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

The following morning, Naruto was brought out of sleep by an odd scratching sound. He refused to open his eyes however and did not react save for a slight twitch of an eyebrow, being far too comfortable at the moment.

A few more minutes of the odd sound preventing him from falling back asleep caused him to deeply inhale the scent of his wife from where he had his nose buried in her hair and twisted around to take a look at what was going on.

Akitsu was sitting in front of a canvas, looking even more sleepy than normal, making the offending sound by dragging a pencil across the aforementioned canvas.

"Akitsu?" He questioned in confusion.

The Ice Sekirei started at the sound and made a noise of distress as the twitch caused her to make an unintended line on the canvas.

"What are you doing?" He asked curiously.

"Drawing." She replied quietly, apparently focused on correcting her earlier mistake.

"You can draw?" he pressed further, now sounding impressed.

The Ice Sekirei colored slightly at his tone, but was spared from having to answer due to Xanna doing it for her.

"Apparently so. She got bored of doing math one day and started doodling in the notebook we gave her until she ran out of space, at which point she stopped." The horned woman murmured, pulling Naruto back down to keep him from leaving the bed to take a look at the unfinished picture. It was still dark outside and there were several hours of cuddling yet to be done.

"Why would she do that?" Naruto wondered.

"Embarrassment." Was the flat answer, making Akitsu pout slightly behind her canvas.

"O...kay." He said uncomprehendingly. "Can I see what you're making Akitsu?"

Akitsu pinked again at the idea of it, nervous about what he would say. Xanna had said that it was pretty good, but she couldn't help thinking that it really wasn't and didn't want to be criticised. She wouldn't have even been drawing in the open like this if Xanna hadn't more or less told her to get a hobby.

Xanna sighed in minor irritation, seeing that they wouldn't be getting back to the cuddling until her husband's curiosity on the matter was satisfied. "Bring it here."

The command giving her no real choice in the matter, she did so and then shuffled nervously behind the drawing while they inspected it.

It was obviously still incomplete, but there was enough of it done to see that it was a drawing of the two of them sleeping, with Naruto spooning Xanna, the sheet just below their waist and their hair splayed everywhere. There was even the start of what seemed to be moonlight coming in through the balcony.

It was a bit rough around the edges, giving the impression that Akitsu still hadn't figured how to properly draw certain things, but Naruto barely noticed that. After all, his last attempts at art had been a dick carving and a smiley face that he'd left for Ra to find.

The thing with Bastet's temple didn't count, because he'd cheated to make that.

"That's really good." He complimented, grinning at her pleased/embarrassed blush. "Did you do all of this just now?"

Akitsu nodded happily and swayed around a bit with her hands clasped behind her back, pleased that he liked it.

Xanna on the other hand frowned in thought as she looked at the drawing. It looked like the work of at least a few hours. "Akitsu, how long have you been working on that exactly?"

"Ah...since you fell asleep?"

"And how did you know when we fell asleep?"

"..."

"Akitsu, have you been listening to us have sex so that you could start drawing when we stopped?"

"Maybe?"

Naruto sniggered into Xanna's hair, more than a little amused by Akitsu's antics. It would certainly explain why she looked so sleepy if she'd been up the whole night, first doing her creepy stalker eavesdropping and then drawing them in their sleep.

"Why?" Xanna pressed relentlessly, paying no mind to her easily amused husband.

"Full moons...good light." Akitsu offered as an explanation.

Xanna looked through the open balcony that let in a pleasantly cool night breeze and saw that both moons were indeed nearly full, offering considerable illumination even during the night. Having both of them full at the same time was something of a rare event actually, but not extremely so.

"You could have simply asked." She pointed out.

"...You were busy."

It was Naruto that frowned this time, detecting a note of melancholy in her tone, probably feeling left out but trying to hide it. He could tell that something had happened while he'd been gone and he'd get the full story later. For now it would be enough to make the Ice Sekirei get some of the sleep she'd missed out on, as well as some attention.

He made a come hither gesture with his hand towards Akitsu, causing the Sekirei to be pulled towards them. Her silk kimono suffered the same fate as several hundred of its predecessors as it was ripped to shreds before she was allowed into bed with them.

She ended up with her face nestled in Xanna's breasts due to the horned woman being determined to get back to the morning cuddling and this way she got it from both sides. Tired as she was, Akitsu fell asleep quickly.

"I see you've had a talk with her." Naruto murmured into his wife's ear once he was certain that Akitsu was fast asleep.

Xanna hummed confirmingly but said no more. It remained to be seen whether Akitsu could develop some personality from this or if she would backslide into being a living accessory. For the moment she just wished that Naruto would stop talking already.

Deciding to drop it for now, Naruto started talking about another interesting event from the recent past.

"You'll never guess who dropped in on me on Ratania..."

With a small sigh, she answered. "It was that Oma woman wasn't it?"

"Okay, so you'll easily guess who it was, but you'll never guess what happened."

"You slept with her." _Boring! Now shut up already._

She kept the thought to herself, but if he didn't stop talking soon that was going to change.

"Oh no, this is going to be _much_ better than just sleeping with her."

Interest finally prickled in the horned woman's mind at his tone, which was that particular conniving pitch that Naruto always used when he was planning to do irreparable harm someone's way of life or world view.

"You sound so deliciously devious." She purred. "Whisper your evil plot into my ear..._slowly_."

Naruto went quickly started getting hard at her tone, and finished getting hard even faster when he felt her hand wrap around the hardening member and start stroking in an encouraging manner.

He'd been intending to tell her everything anyway, but he certainly wasn't going to complain about the extra incentive, so he used his lowest, sexiest rumble to reveal his intentions towards one Oma Desala, being more loquacious about it than originally intended.

Akitsu ended up being woken up shortly after that and ended up even more exhausted than before, but she did eventually get some sleep.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

_Months later._

After shaking off the latest case of Naruto induced frustration, Oma had showed up again to help him and Xanna start up their empire as agreed upon. She had no intention of being present on a constant basis, but would pop in from time to time and offer advice to help things along.

Naruto had indeed been correct in his suspicion that she intended to attempt planting the seeds of some more ethical behavior if possible, but she was well aware that the chance was fairly remote. Power did tend to corrupt after all, which was one of the reasons that the ascended secluded themselves away from mortals, removing the temptation to tell them how to run their lives. That at least she did agree with the others on.

Not everyone had always believed so. Oma in particular had argued strenuously in favour of removing the Goa'uld from power since it was their own leftover technology that allowed them to gain it in the first place. It had taken a long time before she had convinced enough of the others to agree to it that they had to be heard by all of the ascended.

An attempt had been made to give the Jaffa the means to overthrow the Goa'uld on their own and the Sodan Warriors had been created, a faction of Jaffa free of Goa'uld influence. They could have conceivably been able to overthrow their former masters with minimal ascended interference.

Unfortunately, the Jaffa as a people were highly spiritual and their culture had severe religious leanings thanks to the Goa'uld. They had abandoned the Goa'uld yes, but they had taken the Ascended as their gods from then on, worshipping them and looking to them for leadership no matter how much they argued against it.

The Ascended had been appalled and stopped interacting with mortals almost entirely, the parallels to the Ori being too great to sit well with them. They did not want to remove the Goa'uld as masters of Avalon as they called this galaxy only to replace them like a mirror of what the Ori had done in their home galaxy.

The interventionist faction as it was called among the Ascended dispersed almost entirely after that abyssmal failure. She had been the only one that had still wanted to try doing something about the Goa'uld instead of letting things happen as they would.

Of course, her later blunder with Anubis had only confirmed their belief that they should leave well enough alone. Truth be told, even Oma had started thinking that and had stopped interacting with mortals save through the caretakers of the handful of sanctuaries scattered across the galaxy.

Naruto and Xanna were a different matter though. They were clearly going to do whatever they wanted no matter what the Ascended thought of it, so she might as well try to offer advice that would nudge them along as positive a path as possible. Hopefully, They would be shaped by the civilization they built just as they shaped it.

So she had taken a metaphorical deep breath to brace herself for what would probably be another incredibly irritating interaction with two horned beings.

Rather shockingly, it proved to not be particularly irritating at all.

She had certainly been put back into a physical body, the same young one that Naruto always used, though this time he had fortunately not inflated her breasts. To her relief, she'd also been given clothing that was much better than the previous leather outfit that was somehow even worse than being naked. Instead of that, she'd found herself wearing a light blue silk blouse with matching pants.

They were far more modest than the leather vest and skintight leather pants, even though the neckline on the blouse was still a bit on the low side. They were also exceedingly comfortable.

Oma had expected that they would get to the business of making plans on how to advance their society right away, but they had refused to talk about it then, insisting that it was time for dinner.

Much to her boundless relief, there had been no meat brought out. Oma wasn't entirely certain that she would have been able to keep her stomach from heaving if she had to see the butchered and cooked remains of dead animals brought out to be eaten.

It had been millions of years since the last time that an Alteran had eaten meat, enough time that they had mostly lost the ability to even digest it. The body that Naruto had created for her could indoubtedly do it, but the deep revulsion she felt at the very idea would have never allowed her to keep it down.

While bodiless it was fairly easy to look at things from a dispassionate distance, to understand that just about any species that reached sentience inevitably became omnivorous due to sheer necessity as a single food source became insufficient to sustain it, but being put into a physical body also forced her to experience the involuntary reactions of said body to powerful emotions.

Try as she might, she could not discern the cause of their insistence for joining them for a meal. If Naruto had done so only to place the cooked flank of some animal in front of her to watch her go green, that she would have expected, but they had clearly steered clear of any kind meat or eggs for her benefit. She didn't even question how they might have known her feelings about such things. For all she knew, Naruto had smelled her discomfort when he'd said she was wearing leather during their last meeting and drawn the correct conclusions.

Despite her initial aprehension of what the reason for their insistence on having her join them for dinner was, it was quite the relaxed affair.

Relaxed in the sense that the horned duo had all the table manners of a rampaging Unas. They grabbed at the food with their hands or sometimes even with their tongues and fought over pieces of food for the sheer sake of fighting over them. Though they somehow managed to keep both themselves and the surrounding area clean through some means that escaped Oma's understanding.

In sharp contrast, the fourth person present, the subdued and perpetually sleepy looking Akitsu was eating at a more sedate pace. She took small bites and chewed carefully, occasionally drinking from the large glass of fruit mulch that she seemed to be particularly fond of and seemed utterly unbothered by the chaos unfolding next to her.

"Are they always like this?" Oma asked her quietly.

"Ah...no." Akitsu answered slowly, blinking slowly at the guest. She had to wonder if Naruto had purposefully made Oma's blouse so thin that her nipples were visibly poking through it. She decided that he probably had, it would be just like him after all. He'd probably been hoping that the sensation of silk rubbing against them would make them get erect. "They're holding back because of you."

_Holding back?_ Oma thought to herself with no small amount of incredulity, seeing that Xanna had just pulled a metal spike out of somewhere and tried to nail Naruto's hand to the table with it.

Eventually, she did start eating, finding that the thick vegetable sauce was actually very tasty.

Seeing as her two hosts were busy fighting over the abundance of food like a pair of starving animals, Oma decided to try getting to know Akitsu instead. The subdued woman might be able to offer some additional insight into their character. She hadn't dared come close enough to learn anything about Akitsu beforehand, so she would need to rediscover the skill of getting to know a person through conversation again.

"How did you meet them?" Oma asked, nodding her head at the warring married couple.

"Ah...Naruto found me in a park and took me home, then he took my virginity." Akitsu answered in fond remembrance.

_Of course he did._ Oma thought to herself, somehow not very surprised even if she was sure that there was a lot of missing backstory to it.

"Did he take your virginity too?"

Oma accidentally dumped the food on her fork(a metal one that was rather beyond the current ability of their fledgling civilization to make) down her cleavage at the innocent sounding question.

"No, he is much too late for that." She answered while using a cloth to clean the food from herself, feeling amused by the question in spite of herself. The subdued woman was rather endearing with her innocent forwardness.

The conversation died at that point, Akitsu having gone back to slowly emptying her plate(ceramic plates, which were once again beyond the local civilizations ability to produce.) and smiling fondly at the horned couple whose fighting seemed to finally be winding down.

Despite the quality of the food(and it really was very good), Oma was glad that the dinner was coming to a close and that they would presumably get to the point of her visit soon.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Oma had been quite mistaken in her presumption.

After dinner, Xanna had insisted on a massage session and hadn't really asked so much as declared that it would be happening.

Oma had tried to protest but been flatly ignored. She'd been relieved of her clothing and told to lay down on the massage bed while the servant girls brought out the oil.

Strangely enough, Naruto had not so much as leered at her or made a single sex driven comment while this was happening, baffling Oma considerably. She knew that it wasn't because his wife was present, knowing that the horned woman cared not at all who her husband bedded.

Not to mention that he flirted with the massage girls the whole time.

Xanna hogged the vast majority of said massage girls, having more of them working on her at a time than the rest of them combined, mostly due to the writhing mass of tails extending from her tailbone.

Seeing Xanna's ten tails up close had at least been interesting and given her the chance to once again ponder them.

From an evolutionary standpoint, having ten tails was completely redundant. Genetic clutter. That wasn't mentioning how it was even possible to have ten of them apparently connected to a single tailbone. Even an animal wouldn't have evolved to have so many useless appendages, much less a bipedal sentient. They should have atrophied long ago, but were instead impossibly long and powerful looking. Then again there were a lot of things that didn't make sense about Naruto and Xanna, so Oma figured that they probably weren't a product of evolution and were only present for aesthetics, which would neatly fit with the horned woman's personality.

That in mind, she focused on just getting through all this pointless hedonism.

Akitsu had been making quiet sounds of pleasure for a while at the pampering and then suddenly let off a little snore that sent Naruto into a round of snickering along with a few of the massage girls. Xanna merely gave an amused smile.

Oma didn't react to it overmuch, because she was finding herself in a similar situation. Despite her disdain for such self indulgence, she had to admit that the way her back and legs were being kneaded felt very good.

That, in combination with the food she'd consumed earlier, left her feeling terribly drowsy. There was no sleep for an ascended being, only meditation, which would not have really helped her stay awake.

She never even realized when the battle was lost and she started snoring right next to the Ice Sekirei.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Oma returned to consciousness feeling flushed and...wet?

An ancient and almost forgotten memory from her first life identified the feeling as that of being mostly submerged in hot water, making her blink her eyes open and look around while the disorientation of sleep receded.

Apparently they'd moved onto a whole new form of self indulgence while she'd been asleep, as the four of them were now sitting in a wide, circular depression filled with hot water.

She was on one side, while the other three were directly across from her. Naruto was in the middle, leaning backwards with his arms resting on the rim, hanging over the shoulders of the two women on either side of him.

"Welcome back to the land of the conscious." He said to her with a smirk, obviously amused that she'd fallen asleep.

Oma simply sighed and sank a bit further into the water, wondering if they were ever going to get down to the actual reason that she'd come here or if they would just keep on going from one hedonistic activity to another until she lost patience and asked to be released from this body.

Not that it wasn't enjoyable, just like the massage had been. The walls of the massive circular tub were padded with something very comfortable and the water felt nice, but this was getting ridiculous.

"Now that we are here, I believe it is time we got to business." Xanna declared seriously.

_Huh?_

"In the bath?" Oma asked, unable to keep the incredulity out of her voice.

"I do some of my best thinking while bathing, why would we do it anywhere else?" The horned woman asked back, seeming genuinely puzzled by Oma's confusion.

Oma had no real argument against that, knowing full well by now that trying to gainsay either Naruto or Xanna when they'd already decided something was useless.

"Very well then." She sighed in resignation.

Xanna hadn't been waiting for Oma's agreement and already had a colorful plastic container of some sort in hand, from which she squeezed a a large portion of what Oma guessed was some kind of liquid soap.

A series of black symbols that made no sense to her at all became prominent all along the walls, somehow forcing the water to move in ways that acted as if there were pressured air jets placed along them as yet another form of massage and also turning the water choppy.

In short order, the bath was full of bubbles.

"Bubbles." Akitsu said happily, smiling at the abundance of floating soap bubbles and poking a few that came too close.

"Yes, bubbles." Naruto agreed, sounding very amused and poking a few of them himself.

"According to my easily distracted husband, " Xanna paused to look pointedly at Naruto, who was still poking bubbles with Akitsu. "you have offered to aid us in the advancement of our empire."

"I have." Oma confirmed with some caution.

She had not envisioned having this discussion in a bubble bath, but she could adapt. There were only so many ways that Naruto could think up to rattle her composture and his sexual predator act from the last time had been worse than this.

"Then you should be made aware of the situation." Xanna stated and created a floating image of Erius, zooming it in on the city in which they were currently located.

"The people that Naruto brought back from Ratania have either settled into homes formerly occupied by people who have left them to make their own settlements or new ones were built for them. This is not counting those who have elected to move elsewhere after getting their bearings."

The image zoomed out and ten smaller settlements began to slowly oscillate to highlight them.

"There are all the population centers currently existing on the planet. They were built by people who wanted to live further away from us, who disliked how crowded Hesa was becoming or those who wished to preserve their own way of life as much as possible."

"Most are cooperating with us even if they would prefer to be left alone and are not resisting the changes we are implementing to their lifestyle, such as education, improved sanitation and a local garrison to protect them from animal attacks as they build and to act as a police force."

"I thought we didn't have crime yet." Naruto interjected curiously.

"Thus far only minor acts of theft." Xanna said dismissively. "Most of those you brought back were too beaten down to have the spirit for anything more severe, but theft occurs as soon as currency is implemented. I have also been using those soldiers to funnel any would-be prostitutes here so that they can be used as teachers since the total education level is still abyssmal."

The talks continued for some time, during which Oma only listened rather than suggesting anything. Much of it she knew already from her own observations, but it was good to hear it from their point of view.

All in all, their rule was surprisingly benign and not at all the way that most dictatorial regimes tended to be. This was likely due to the fact that they weren't mortal and felt no need to feed their own egos by oppressing their subjects, nor did they in any way care to regulate the personal lives of those they ruled.

Xanna was arrogant, condescending, self-centered, lacking most any morals or ethics and outright dismissive of those she considered to be beneath her(which was nearly everyone). Strangely enough, that didn't translate into cruelty, merely cold pragmatism as long as things were done her way.

Naruto on the other hand had a similar egotistical certainty that he knew best combined with lack of care for how other people lived as long as it didn't hit one of his mental triggers. He also seemed less interested in any actual ruling than he was in having fun, though he still put in the work...he just tended to not be particularly serious while he did it.

Oma could only breathe an internal sigh of relief at the fact that they seemed to be capable of grasping the idea that the success of an empire was measured by the prosperity of the people who lived in it and not, as the Goa'uld seemed to think, on how many planets you conquered and how big your army was.

"While our efforts to make everyone at least literate if not highly educated are being obstructed by the need for child labor,-" Xanna was saying, only to be interrupted by Naruto.

"What do you mean _need_ for child labor? Why would it be needed?"

"Because your constant raiding has resulted in our food stores being depleted rapidly, necessitating a similarly rapid expansion of farmland, leading to a shortage of labor that is currently being filled by children." She explained dryly.

"Aw crap." Naruto muttered. If he'd known that, he wouldn't have gone and raided a planet with a population as large as the one on Ratania.

Most of the time that he wasn't spending with her and Akitsu was taken up by training the army and making sure they understood the fact that they weren't there to keep people in line as many of them were used to, but to keep them safe. He hadn't payed much attention to the goings on in the other areas of their growing empire.

While he was not someone that should be trusted to properly raise a child due to his own unconventional upbringing, Naruto did grasp the fact that child labor was generally a bad thing.

"Couldn't we just cheat a little and enhance the food stores instead?"

"I _have_ been doing so, but it is getting to the point where even these dimwitted peasants are beginning to wonder at where all the food is coming from. If we continue doing so, they will begin to get dependent on supernatural aid. Better that they suffer a small shortage of food now than to have them think that all of their problems will be solved in such a manner."

"So...no more raiding?" Naruto asked wryly.

Taking the situation that Xanna had laid out into account he'd probably be unable to go on another raid like this for several years at least.

Erius had a population of just under three hundred thousand these days and many of the people he'd brought along from other planets eventually trickled off and formed their own villages and towns. So far, Xanna had been siphoning off a relatively small number of his warriors to make sure that each of these new settlements had a small complement of soldiers that had gone on at least one raid with Naruto to act as both a police force and a visual reminder that they were not being left to their own devices.

Not all of the warriors were Jaffa anymore, the occasional baseline human having shown interest in training and been accepted. This was all to the good, as many of the people Naruto brought back tended to be resentful of the Jaffa's presence, so having the occasional regular human around made them feel better until they dissociated the Jaffa from the Goa'uld. It helped that Jaffa were in general very disciplined and not inclined to abuse of power. There were a few that needed some re-education on the matter of course, but some Youthful Exercise was usually enough to dissuade them from repeat offences.

She'd also made certain to that at least one or two teachers in an effort to spread education. Getting that off the ground was a hassle, but an unavoidable one.

With this newest population influx, Naruto knew that he wouldn't be able to keep on snatching people without risking the whole thing getting away from them. While it hadn't happened yet, it was only a matter of time before some would-be genius brought up the concept of that most annoying of ideas to someone intending to create an empire..._independence_.

It was a certainty that some hothead would eventually get it into his or her head that they didn't need his or Xanna's rule and could manage just fine on their own.

Perhaps true in the case of those who had lived on worlds without a local Goa'uld overseer, but if they were going to let people create their own factions right under his nose, they wouldn't have bothered starting at the bottom.

Besides, allowing the people that had been brought together from a dozen different planets to splinter into a dozen nations would not end well. That much had been learned back in the Elemental Nations.

Diversity was good, division was bad.

"Not for a while, the population here is still somewhat small, but not so tiny anymore that it would be needed. At this point it is more important that we make certain that all of these people understand that they are part of a single nation instead of refugees from dozens." Xanna spoke, echoing his own thoughts.

"Roads, you will need to build roads." Oma interjected.

Naruto and Xanna cocked their heads curiously at the sudden interruption.

Even Akitsu stopped popping bubbles for a moment.

"At the moment, most of these disparate settlements are not connected even with dirt roads. Building a road system to connect them will foster commerce and allow for better interaction. Eventually you will want to call the leaders of these villages to meet you as a show of loyalty or perhaps assign your own governors."

Naruto and Xanna exchanged glances and mulled it over for a moment before agreeing that this made sense. Neither one of them had ever been hindered by a lack of roads and Xanna's previous two empires already had such things when she'd taken over, so neither had thought of it.

"That seems a valid point, but we have other issues." The horned woman said, making four particular settlements glow red on the illusionary map.

"These four villages contain people that may be...problematic...for a while."

"Why?" Naruto asked, puzzled. If he didn't miss his guess, one of those contained people from the raid on Bastet's territory(that had been fun), one from Yu's and two from Ra's.

"These three," Xanna said, highlighting the three settlement on the map. "Do not like the way we treat women and have moved away from us solely because of that."

"But I've barely interacted with their women, and I'm pretty sure that I wasn't even being creepy at the time." Naruto protested, utterly baffled.

"It is a heavily male dominated society, they don't like the fact that we are not oppressing women." Xanna elaborated, smirking. "They may also have been upset at the idea of being ruled by a woman."

"They went off on their own because I wouldn't let them treat their women like a servant class?" Naruto asked just to be clear.

"Just so, they claim that it is part of their culture and that changing it would rob them of their identity." She confirmed.

Naruto muttered something to himself that was too low to hear clearly, but it seemed to imply that a broken neck would also rob them of their identity, and much more effectively at that.

"What about that last one then?" He asked, setting the issue aside for now.

"They come from a heavily female dominated society." Xanna explained, still smirking.

Naruto facepalmed, already seeing where this was going. "Let me guess, they don't like the fact that we're not oppressing the men?"

"A brilliant deduction husband, I am struck by awe at your masterful grasp of the obvious."

Naruto ignored her sarcasm in favor of muttering to himself sourly. "That explains why those bitches were giving me the stink eye when I marched them through the stargate."

Shaking his head, he looked at his wife and sighed in a put upon fashion. "My dear wife, do you ever get the feeling that you're surrounded by idiots?"

"It is the only feeling I have ever known." She responded haughtily.

Naruto shot his wife at short leer at what was most definitely an area-of-effect insult and then rubbed at his forehead with another sigh. "I guess I'm going to be paying those four places a visit and laying down the law."

"If you assert your will with force, you will only sow resentment." Oma cautioned. "It takes time to change the social structure of a society."

"I'm not feeling very patient right now and people tend to listen more closely if they're nursing a sore jaw." Naruto argued. "They can be as resentful as they like, but they _will_ conform to the law of the land."

"It was you who brought them here, they did not choose to come. If you force them to obey you in such a manner after claiming that you would protect them from the Goa'uld, they will think you no different." She countered.

"They were just host bodies and slave labor for the Goa'uld, all I'm trying to do is get them to stop being fucking stupid." Naruto insisted.

"If you move on them with force, they are unlikely to see such direct interference in their lifestyle as helpful and benevolent, but rather as tyrannical and oppressive."

Naruto humphed irritably and looked at his wife, who had been oddly silent during this exchange. "What do you think love? I guess I can see her point, but I still say a round of bitchslaps might do the trick."

Xanna mulled the issue over carefully before replying. "The last time I had to deal with unruly subjects, I ordered several executions..."

Oma was alarmed, and only kept from interrupting because of the warning glance that the horned woman gave her.

"...However, that only caused a rebellion to ferment among the people. It may be for the best to try a subtler approach and we can always resort to force if it fails." She concluded.

"I guess." Naruto agreed without enthusiasm. Was he doomed to solve problems like a supposedly civilized person for his entire tenure as Emperor? Would he never again get to settle arguments with his fists? Would he one day find himself sitting at a negotiation table with the System Lords and being serious as opposed to thinking of ways to humiliate and murder them creatively?

He sank a bit lower into the water at the thought of it and looked over at Akitsu, who seemed to be having fun building a soap mountain.

"Am I becoming a mature adult sweetie? Is that the terrible sacrifice I am making for all those cute Sekirei?" He asked her with despondent melodrama.

Akitsu blinked at him, having not expected to be talked to while they were having this serious discussion. But Naruto just looked so sad and sulky at the fact that he wasn't able to smack sense into people that she had to do something to make him feel better.

Determined to help him, Akitsu scooped up a portion of the soap and used her ice powers to harden its shape into what she wanted. Then she stuck it to his forehead and froze it into place.

"Triceratops." She chirped, proudly surveying the soap horn he now had on his forehead in addition to the regular horns higher on his head.

Xanna snorted with laughter, the expelled air blasting apart another pile of soap.

Naruto tried to contain the amused grin breaking out on his face at the ridiculousness of the situation, but quickly lost the battle.

Even Oma cracked a smile, though she wasn't sure which tri-horned animal Akitsu was referring to. There was more than one such in the galaxy after all.

"It suits you husband." Xanna complimented. "Now you need only walk on all fours so that it is immediately clear that you are a horny animal."

Naruto shot his wife an affronted look and splashed some water at her.

This time it was Xanna that looked affronted. "You would dare start a water fight with me? I am a _goddess_! I am-"

"Badly positioned!" He cut in with a grin and used the arm he still had around her shoulders to dunk her.

Akitsu floated over to Oma's side of the bathtub and they both watched as the horned woman tried to pry apart Naruto's headlock while air bubbles escaped from the water.

Apparently having had enough, the hitherto missing tails made a reappearance and grabbed Naruto around the neck and dragged him under the water as well.

The two women that were currently not participating in the mock battle/attempted drowning scrambled out of the water to prevent becoming collateral damage. Oma nearly collapsed due to the sudden headrush, but was saved from a pratfall by Akitsu.

Several minutes of rather vicious looking flailing later, they emerged from the water, Xanna pinning Naruto to the edge of the tub with her hands pulling on his soaked hair and glaring at him from a very close range.

Naruto grinned at her lustily and pecked her on the lips, getting an aggressive and violent kiss in return.

Oma had assumed that this strange interruption would pass and they would get back to the conversation, but when Xanna climbed into Naruto's lap with the clear intention of starting intercourse, she loudly cleared her throat to draw attention to herself.

She was ignored, so she did it again, this time even louder.

With an irritated growl, Xanna turned around to give her a narrow eyed glare and hissed "_What?_"

"Do we not still have something to discuss?" Oma asked with as much dignity as was possible for someone that was using her hands to cover her breasts and groin.

"I suppose we do." Xanna conceded grudgingly, getting off Naruto's lap and settling back down beside him.

As Oma settled back into her previous position, Akitsu tried to do the same, only to get pulled between Naruto and Xanna, causing a flush to creep onto her face that had nothing to do with the steam.

Oma started feeling incredibly uncomfortable as she saw that both of Akitsu hands were making repetitive motions of some sort under the water on each side of her, coincidentally at the areas where she estimated Naruto and Xanna had their respective genitals.

"I must confess to having little idea of how to do away with this foolishness without resorting to force. My thought was to assign a larger than normal garrison there and make compulsory education sessions that would beat the idea of gender equality into their heads." Xanna said with a smirk as if the conversation had not been interrupted.

"No matter what you do, it will take at least a few generations before such thinking is completely changed, but their populations are small enough that enough contact with a different culture will dilute their resistance to change. Commerce and perhaps having that female commander in your army take charge of the local garrison for a time should begin the process. Combined with proper education and it might sway the minds of the younger generation at least." Oma replied, studiously ignoring what was going on under the water.

"Setsuna's going to be pissed about that, but she'd do it if I asked." Naruto murmured, clearly paying more attention to Akitsu's ministrations than to the conversation."That only works for the male dominated ones though."

"Have you considered hosting a celebration of some sort?" Oma asked further.

Two horned heads cocked to the side in curiosity. "A celebration? Of what?"

"Of their liberation from Goa'uld oppression or some such thing. At the moment, most of the common people see you either as an unstoppable conqueror or an aloof and distant ruler." Oma explained, looking first to Naruto and then to Xanna and trying to ignore the fact that they were starting to breathe more heavily than normal. "A celebration attended by both of you would serve to make the people feel closer to you, show them that they are not at all different from each other and mingle the differing cultures you now have on Erius."

"She has a point, a good party always makes people forget that they're supposed to hate each other." Naruto said pensively.

"True, I had forgotten that most of these monkey brained humans have the attention span of a rabid squirrel." Xanna agreed.

Oma relaxed her stiff spine at their agreement. Potential tyranny averted for now and replaced with a far more sensible approach. They had clearly been interested enough in the suggestion that even some of the sexual charge in the air had dissipated.

They had good enough intentions, that was clear. Their reasons might be strange and their regard for the people they ruled appallingly low, but the end result they were going for was good, admirable even. Their problem lay mostly in the fact that they were too at home with using violence and force to solve problems.

"That is all that I have to say for now. Release me from this body and I will be on my way." She said, feeling exhausted, both by the mental effort of steering them away from what might have been the first step on the road to the creation of yet another oppressive empire, and physically from the steam that was making her feel woozy.

She felt satisfied with the effort though. Hopefully, the centuries of taking care of their people that lay ahead would smooth over some of the sharp edges from their personalities. At the very least, she hoped that force would stop being the first thing they considered when they needed a solution.

"Not yet you won't." Naruto said sharply, snapping Oma's attention back to him. "When you first suggested this, I figured you were going to be making some kind of half-baked suggestions, but this was actually useful, so you're going to stick around for a few minutes longer and share a toast with us."

"A toast?" Oma questioned, puzzled.

"Yep, here, have some Sex on the Beach." He grinned and handed her a glass full of a colorful red-orange liquid.

"This drink is called Sex on the Beach?" Oma asked while Naruto brought out more glasses for Xanna, Akitsu and himself. Oma was glad to see him do this, because Akitsu had to take her hands away from what they'd been doing so far.

"Yes." He nodded firmly.

Akitsu took a small sip of the concoction and smiled at the taste, quietly murmuring something about liquid candy.

"Why?" Oma pressed further, turning the glass around and trying to see how anyone could name a drink such a strange name.

"Who knows?" Naruto shrugged. "Maybe the inventor was having sex on the beach when he or she thought of it, or maybe the colors reminded them of a sunset on a beach where they once had sex. Or maybe, and this is my guess, it's named that because fuck you, that's why."

"There was most certainly some fucking involved in the naming of this drink." Xanna agreed.

"Ah...could we have sex on the beach?" Akitsu asked, her cheeks red.

"We are having Sex on the Beach." Naruto said, grinning.

Akitsu visibly fidgeted and sipped on her drink. "I mean...could we go to the beach and have sex?"

"An excellent idea." Xanna declared and drained her entire glass in one shot. "We are going immediately."

"Defile ALL the sand!"

"Yay."

"Wait! What about..."Oma trailed off as the trio vanished, the water splashing as it rushed to fill the emptiness they left behind.

"...me."

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

**And the fifth chapter be done.**

**My first chapter posted as an unemployed man. I feel sad that I will not waste time at work by reading reviews, but I also feel happy that I will not waste time working. Life is too long and there is too much time in the world and not enough good ways to waste it all.**

**Also, please drop a review :P.**


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